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This paper reports on a study with rural young people (aged 10-24 years) in Malawi and Lesotho, focusing on their opportunities to learn skills and access capital and assets to engage in income-generating activities (IGAs). Participatory group exercises and individual interviews provide many examples of how young people learn skills and start small businesses, as well as an insight into their strategic thinking about engaging in these livelihood options. Various factors, including the effects of AIDS, are shown to affect young people's prospects of succeeding in their ventures. Young people are very keen on starting IGAs, and are supported by adult members of their communities in asking for interventions to help them. We argue that expanded vocational and business training, focusing on locally appropriate types and scale of businesses, coupled with help to raise start-up capital has the potential to improve the chances of young people who are poor and/or AIDS-affected securing sustainable rural livelihoods in their futures. Since AIDS is intertwined with many other issues affecting young people's livelihoods, it is problematic to single out and target only AIDS-affected young people with interventions on skills building and IGAs. Policymakers' attitudes to vocational skills training and support for IGAs in Malawi and Lesotho are also explored, and policy recommendations made to support vulnerable rural young people in their attempts to build sustainable livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presence-absence maps of the occurrence of species may be difficult to interpret because of uneven coverage in field surveys. Using data collected in the mountain Kingdom of Lesotho. southern Africa, where even coverage was virtually impossible to achieve, a method is presented to improve bird atlas maps by plotting predicted probabilities of occurrence calculated from logistic models. A set of habitat variables derived from maps was reduced to principal components and then used in logistic models to predict the occurrence of bird species across the country. The models generate a probability of occurrence for all survey squares irrespective of coverage. Maps for the Cape vulture Gyps coprotheres (Forster), ground woodpecker Geocolaptes olivaceus (Gmelin) and pied crow Corvus albus Muller are presented as examples. The models were assessed by jack-knife analysis and correctly predicted presence and absence in the field data. Relationships between the predicted probabilities, recording frequency (reporting rate) and density are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]