Internally displaced people (IDPs) in Baidoa face a daily struggle to build their livelihoods and earn a living. Many blame low-paid work opportunities, unreliable aid, poor housing conditions and social marginalisation. Prospects for building sustainable livelihoods are moving even further out of reach in the wake of the funding cuts.

Aid actors are waking up to a new reality where the prevailing rhetoric of ‘doing more with less’ (finding ways to maximise impact in spite of funding constraints) is shifting to ‘having to do less with less’ (being forced to make difficult cuts and trade-offs due to funding constraints).

In this paper, we recommend a different approach – one that entails ‘working differently with less’. What does this mean in practical terms?

1. Building on the existing strategies, skills and capacities of affected communities, in order to strengthen their resilience and agency to build their lives and livelihoods on their own terms.
2. Focusing on the enabling environment, rather than specific activities or interventions – in particular, aspects of everyday life (lending practices, unpaid care work, social relations, migration and mobility, housing and transport) that ultimately determine the extent to which communities can rebuild their lives and livelihoods in displacement.
3. Being willing to relinquish control over the kinds of trajectories and outcomes that aid actors want or expect from specific groups of people.

The Baidoa paper is the third in a series of studies designed to piece together the wider puzzle of livelihoods in displacement. It was preceded by a study on Mekelle, Ethiopia, and a study on Mosul, Iraq, as well as a series of thematic studies focused on extreme weather, debt, unpaid care work and social capital.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute