Assets, ‘Asset-ness’ and Graduation

Abstract

Asset-based approaches -usually involving asset transfers and/or asset building -are increasingly central to thinking about poverty alleviation, social protection, graduation and livelihood resilience. Although the notion of assets is well established in the literature, the meanings of and relationships between asset(s), livelihood capital(s), risks(s), welfare and wellbeing, and graduation need further analysis. We examine issues arising from asset-based approaches to poverty reduction and introduce the idea of 'asset-ness' -the qualities and characteristics of different assets -which have received little attention from those promoting or designing asset-based social protection programmes. We argue that asset-ness provides a key to understanding differences in the impacts of asset-based social protection and associated processes and dynamics of graduation. As such the article aims to advance understanding of graduation theory. We develop this argument with reference to domestic livestock, which are commonly distributed to poor people as part of asset-based poverty alleviation and social protection programmes.

Revisiting Rwanda’s agricultural intensification policy: benefits of embracing farmer heterogeneity and crop-livestock integration strategies

“…Therefore, provision of start-up assets (such as in-kind or gift of cows) and securing the right to meet their basic needs (especially housing and land) can potentially help broaden the access to a crop-livestock integration pathway (Streeten, 1982). However, having access to or just owning these assets does not necessarily guarantee integration (Kim & Sumberg, 2015). While the initial transfer of livestock may lift the poor to the first rung of the pathway to asset accumulation, training in crop and livestock farming and rearing and follow-up veterinary support could increase the chances of generating a surplus, as we have seen from the farmers in the rural village but not for the urban counterparts.…”

Youth engagement in livestock production and marketing in East Africa

“…Kim and Sumberg (2015) describe some ways in which the qualities and characteristics of different livestock assets such as productivity, and maintenance of livestock, e.g. feeding, create implications that are linked to, but at the same time go far beyond, the sum of the individual attributes, that they refer to as "asset-ness" (Kim and Sumberg, 2015: 127).…”

Agrarian modernization through "ideal agricultural subjects": a lost cause for smallholders in Rwanda?

“…There are a number of factors involved in dairy production including individual (a cow's breed and its genetic makeup), systemic (the conditions of production environments) as well as managerial (motivation and aspiration and technical capability of livestock keepers). When considered together, these production factors have varying effects on costs and outputs depending on the types of livestock and scale of production (Kim and Sumberg 2015).…”