Kenya: Turkana pastoralists encouraged to innovate to build resilience to drought

Fearing that climate change increases the frequency of droughts, the US African Development Foundation (USADF) is attempting a new approach to help a northern Kenyan region use its livestock and land to build economically sustainable activities that will enable pastoralists to survive when drought and hunger strike. "Last year, when we had one of the severest droughts in about 60 years, we found one of the reasons it was so bad was that people have been unable to recover from previous droughts," said Beatrice Teya, who heads the UN Development Programme's (UNDP) disaster risk reduction and recovery team.

"For pastoralists, our biggest challenge is to educate them on holding capacity," Mulama says. "Why should I hold 1,000 goats when I can only feed 100?" USADF has successfully formed former pastoralists into co-operatives to manage water resources and build capacity in farming techniques, breaking the dependency on handouts, reports Peter Guest, writing for the Guardian. "You know," said defiantly a Turkana, "we could feed the whole of Kenya."