Impact of Water Availability and Conservation Trends on Livestock and Community Mobilization: In Case of Yabello, Southern, Ethiopia

The Yabello range land in southern Ethiopia is the main rangeland site in Ethiopia and this rangeland highly characterized by a lack of rivers or other open surface water. Those resulted to frequent mobilization of livestock and the local community. This paper focus on assessing the impact of Water availability and conservation trends on livestock and community mobilization. The data were collected from three kebele of Yabello district (Dida Tuyura, Danbal-Waccu and Arero) selected purposefully. PRA, Field survey method, semi-structured questionnaires were applied to 40 community representative in each of the selected kebele in total of 120 community representatives were interviewed that supported by direct observation and informal discussion to understand the availability and conservation trends of water and its impact on the life style of the community. And the type of water source, trends of use, watering methods of livestock, management practice in the community, the introduction other methods for water harvesting techniques its benefit and limitation as compared to the past decade practices were assessed. This research data also reveals that the integration of scientific technologies, policies and community indigenous knowledge in order to sustain the solution to scarcity of water and its impact on the local community is vital issue for Yabello area.

Keywords: Water resource, Community, Livestock, mobilization, Indigenous knowledge