In the isolated border lands between Kenya and Somalia, families have always clung to a precarious existence. Now a decade of droughts has tested their endurance
Hawa Hassan comes leading three donkeys, accompanied by two female relatives and a handful of the family’s smallest children. They have walked out of the drought-withered acacia scrub, travelling 15 miles in a day to reach the Kenyan settlement of Makutano, not far from the border with Somalia.
Makutano is a sparse collection of tukuls – dome-shaped dwellings patched with cloth and tarpaulin and sections of woven-grass matting – scattered along the dirt road.
Read more (Guardian)
ILRI Clippings 
This Guardian article tells a heart-breaking story about “pastoral dropouts”, a story that may mark “not simply the end . . . of generations of nomadic existence in the isolated lands where Kenya meets Somalia and Ethiopia, but the imminent collapse of a whole way of life that has been destroyed by an unprecedented decade of successive droughts”.
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The article says this region has experienced three serious droughts in the last decade, when formerly a drought occurred every 9 to 12 years. This change in global weather patterns “has been whittling away at the nomads’ capacity to restock with animals—to replenish and survive—normally a period of about three years”.
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Are those trying to assist the nomads, as this article says, only “hastening the end of nomadic pastoralism in this region”?
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Is climate change hastening culture change?
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Here are four things the International Livestock Research Institute and its partners are doing to help pastoral communities in this region increase their resilience in the face of the current drought, as well as population growth, climate change, and other big changes affecting pastoral ways of life:
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(1) Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the Kitengela rangelands of Kenya (outside Nairobi) obtain and use evidence that new schemes to pay herders small sums of money per hectare to keep their lands unfenced are working for the benefit of livestock and wildlife movements alike.
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(2) Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the rangelands surrounding Kenya’s famous Masai Mara National Reserve to obtain and use evidence that public-private partnerships now building new wildlife conservancies that pay pastoralists to leave some of their lands for wildlife rather than livestock grazing are win-win options for conservationists and pastoral communities alike.
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(3) Scientists have refined and mass produced a vaccine against the lethal cattle disease East Coast fever—and are helping public-private partnerships to regulate and distribute the vaccine in 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa where the disease is endemic—so that pastoral herders can save some of their famished livestock in this drought from attack by disease, and use those animals to rebuild their herds when the drought is over.
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(4) Scientists are characterizing and helping to conserve the indigenous livestock breeds that Africa’s pastoralists have kept for millennia—breeds that have evolved special hardiness to cope with harsh conditions such as droughts and diseases—so that these genetic traits can be more widely used to cope with the changing climate.
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What else are scientists doing to help? What else should scientists be doing?
Of course Pastoralism will not end soon. But it’s dying a painfull death. Some of these losses could be avoided, if both the pastoralists, other key stakeholders and especially the governments involved were proactive in providing timely and reliable information on droughts, markets, fighting corruption and inefficiencies in the livestock industry e.g what we saw recently at KMC…
The players could also work to provide refuge for calves to be used in re-stocking and in sensitizing pastoralists on when to sell depending on the information available from the meteorological department. Can’t we package some information such as “…in the North Eastern region of Kenya, the general condition of cattle is….in April. The rains have failed. The nearest pastures available are xxxkilometres away. The water situation is xxx. The next rains expected in xxx where the probability of receiving normal rainfall is xxx. As a result of the above the situation is bleak, especially for any weakened livestock in the region. The government and other players (e.g NGOs) would like to encourage livestock owners to sell the most vulnerable of their livestock as losses are likely to be high….?
Then the government and the other players can say e.g. that KMC will take xx numbers of livestock and that Treasury has set aside some money for that….??? Why must we always wait for the last minute?? This is sheer disorganization!