Friday, 19 July 2024

The terminal neglect of Northern Kenya (and some pastoral remedies)


“Perhaps no other livelihood system has suffered more from biased language and narratives than pastoralism.” Peter D. Little


Disease area

Known as the Northern Frontier Districts (NFD) during the colonial era, North Eastern Province (NEP) from 1963-2013 and now the Frontier Counties Development Council (FCDC) region in the post-devolution period from 2013, it includes the Northern Rift in the northwest of Kenya, the NFD/NEP to the north and east and the southeastern Tana and Lamu counties, making up about two-thirds of the country. 



This arid and semi-arid region is associated with mobile pastoralism – the nation's largest supplier of meats (beef, mutton, chevon), camel milk, animal hides and skins – contains significant numbers and varieties of wildlife in generally natural and open rangelands, is adjacent to the Indian Ocean and borders all countries around Kenya apart from Tanzania, signifying its strategic importance to the economy, security and diplomacy of the country.

Tracing sources of the malaise 

The underdevelopment of the Frontier Counties can be understood through an epidemiological (study of the spread of disease) lens. John Snow’s map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in the Soho District of London – which hypothesised that germ-contaminated water was the source of the epidemic – is a good place to start.

By pin-pointing the incidence of sickness and deaths in the district and overlaying the dots around water sources in the general area of the outbreak, Dr Snow was able to observe a concentration of effects around a single water pump and when tested, the water from this source contained the cholera-causing contamination. This seminal visual communication study is regarded as the founding event of epidemiology.

Policy and political contamination 

The tone and attitude towards the Frontier Counties was set by Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965 (SP 10’65) during the first post-independence government of President Jomo Kenyatta (1963-1978), two key paragraphs of which are quoted below:

SP 10’65, p46, para133 (note the underlined): 
One of our problems is to decide how much priority we should give in investing in less developed provinces. To make the economy as a whole grow as fast as possible, development money should be invested where it will yield the largest increase in net output. This approach will clearly favour the development of areas having abundant natural resources, good land and rainfall, transport and power facilities and people receptive to and active in development.

SP 10’65, p47, para136 (note the underlined)
Today some of the provinces and districts that have genuine economic potential remain underdeveloped simply because the people will not accept new ways and the necessary discipline of planned and co-ordinated development. In these areas a concerted and prolonged effort to overcome prejudices and suspicions is needed before development can take place.

Effects

Approved by cabinet and passed by parliament in 1965, political attitude followed government policy set out by SP 10'65 as Odhiambo (2014, 2013) has observed. The neglect of the region which festered within the implementing civil service and provincial administration endured even when political actors changed and new development plans were drawn. This may explain the persistence of the mind-set that Frontier Counties were a bad investment because the people were not receptive to nor active in "development" – a sentiment which stubbornly adhered to successive administrations for 40 years. 

According to Hassan, Kanyinga and Nathan (2023):
This [thinking was] based partially on a lengthy record of failed development interventions among pastoralists (Dyer 2013; Fratkin 1997; Niamir-Fuller 1999). According to Simpson and Waweru (2021), the colonial administration found Samburu district [for example] less productive and not what they preferred - ‘government on the cheap’. The independent government pursued the same thinking as the colonial administration – viewing the land occupied by pastoralists as ‘devastated by overgrazing’ (Simpson and Waweru 2021). This then meant there were no substantial development projects, thus further marginalising Samburu and other communities in northern Kenya (Waweru 2012).

The marginalisation continued after independence (Markakis 1987), as the new government also did not invest in any substantial programmes for education, social amenities or development that would fit the mobile communities like pastoralists (Turton 1972). In some instances, lawmakers … simply failed to understand and recognise pastoralism as a mode of production that suit[ed] existing communities’ lifestyle and environment. The lack of support for pastoral practices and the exclusion of the region from development projects added to the marginalisation of northern Kenya (Markakis 2004).

Yet, pastoralist communities had their own customary practices and norms that governed their access of land and resources (Okoth-Ogendo 2002). While pastoralists relied on reciprocal arrangements of access and negotiated access among their communities and outside their kinship ties (Fratkin 2001), most of the government efforts and policies on land were in line with the land use of settled agricultural communities [i.e., in “high potential areas”]. What was lacking in many of these instances was a proper understanding of pastoralism as a mode of production suitable for the environment [i.e., “low potential areas”]. The effect is seen in the subsequent debates about the viability of pastoralism and suggestions on the need to transform the practice.

According to Niamir-Fuller (1999), governments and international development organisations have failed to consider and meet pastoral peoples’ needs and to accommodate their unique mode of production. In general, there is agreement that policies in Kenya have failed to fully secure pastoralists’ access to rangelands and mobility and to support their livestock and by that secure their livelihoods. The attitude towards pastoralists’ choice of livelihood and their mode of production also implies that most of the interventions developed for these communities are not in tandem with the pastoralist’s aspirations and key aspects of their livelihood, like mobility.

Little (2013) adds:
Perhaps no other livelihood system has suffered more from biased language and narratives than pastoralism. Some of the worst misperceptions equate pastoralism with poverty, violence, illegal trade, economic inefficiency, ineffective tenure systems, environmental degradation, hunger and food aid dependency, and/or ‘vacant’ wastelands. These discourses have important political, policy, and practical implications and, as this book has shown, can be invoked to justify particular actions by the state. These directives include the sedentarization of pastoralists in settlements, the allocation of pastoralist lands to investors and conservation groups, and/or the imposition of land titling programmes for both pastoralists and non-pastoralists. In the past, one might attribute these misinformed narratives, policies, and programmes to ignorance on the part of governments. However, the massive amounts of money, powerful interests, and personal benefits (‘rents’) currently associated with some of these actions, such as the leasing or sale of pastoral lands, point to more sinister motivations on the part of state officials. Hidden in these narratives also are political agendas that perceive mobile pastoralism as a security and political threat to the state and, therefore, in need of controlling or eliminating. In sum, the continued existence of powerful and harmful narratives about pastoralism requires persistent efforts to counter them, such as the recent work on economic contributions of pastoralism that Behnke and Muthami (2011) and Behnke and Kerven (this book) have pursued.

Accurate diagnosis

It appears evident that the neglect of Northern Kenya was in large part driven by its association with pastoralists and their production systems. When you consider the economic, ecological and cultural identity cases for pastoralism, you realise that the natural landscapes and resources of the region on the one hand and ethnic peoples and their traditional practices on the other are the very limited means to usefully exploit and manage arid and semi-arid lands. 

Attempts at treatment (relevant policy, programme and project prescriptions)

President Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002): 
District Focus for Rural Development; Department for Rural Planning; tarmacking of major roads outside the main urban areas; Turkwel Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station (in a Frontier County).

President Mwai Kibaki (2002-2013, perhaps the best attempt at redress):
Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation; Ministry of State for Northern Kenya and other Arid Areas; Constituency Development Fund (CDF); Kenya Vision 2030 including LAPSSET (Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia transport corridor); Isiolo-Moyale highway (LAPSSET); Isiolo International Airport (LAPSSET); Vision 2030 Development Strategy for Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands; presidency coincides with the new Constitution of Kenya 2010 which set up the landmark devolved system of governance.

President Uhuru Kenyatta (2013-2022): 
Berth 1 at Lamu Port (LAPSSET); Big 4 Agenda (housing, food security, manufacturing, universal healthcare).

President William Ruto (2022-): 
Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda (with a focus on agriculture, MSMEs, affordable housing and settlements, healthcare, digital superhighway, creative industries); State Department for the ASALs and Regional Development.

Policy doses over time


Current post-treatment conditions (pastoralism specific) 


Localised FCDC therapies (adapted for pastoralism)

Condition A & C above – likely to remain pastoral producers and main users of rangeland BUT ONLY IF the distance dimension (see FCDC nd: p21-23 and 28-31) is addressed with infrastructure to support mobility, production and connectivity to local, domestic and export markets as well as education, health (including animal health), water & sanitation, housing, energy and communication services (the six foundations for development) which may remain concentrated in population centres before mobile / remote delivery and sales channels are better developed to serve nomadic populations, e.g., by operationalising the National Council on Nomadic Education in Kenya and the Livestock Marketing Board, outcomes of the post-2003 ASAL policy initiatives (see Elmi and Birch 2013).

Condition B & D above – likely to move to growing FCDC towns like Isiolo, Marsabit, Moyale and Garissa thus addressing the density dimension (see FCDC nd: p21-23 and 28-31); these pastoral segments could be ‘pulled’ into economically integrated and socially supported urban livelihoods BUT ONLY IF service delivery institutions to provide education, health, water & sanitation, housing, energy and communication services are developed and expanded in these towns to accommodate pastoral out-migration.

Case notes

Catley, A., Lind, J. and Scoones, I. (Eds). (2013) Pastoralism and development in Africa: Dynamic change at the margins. Abingdon: Routledge.

Elmi, M. and Birch, I. (2013) Creating Policy Space for Pastoralism in Kenya. Future Agricultures, Working Paper No. 068. Brighton: Future Agricultures Consortium

Frontier Counties Development Council. (nd) Socio-economic blueprint for the Frontier Counties Development Council: Towards a regional and territorial approach for local development. Nairobi: FCDC.

Hassan, R., Kanyinga, K. and Nathan, I. (2023). No Option but to Settle! The Community Land Act, Devolution and Pastoralism in Samburu County, Kenya. Nomadic Peoples 27: 292–314.

Lind, J., Okenwa, D. and Scoones, I. (Eds). (2020) Land, investment and politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s pastoral drylands. Suffolk: James Currey.

Little, P. (2013) Reflections on the Future of Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa. p243-249. In: Catley, A., Lind, J. and Scoones, I. (Eds). Pastoralism and development in Africa: Dynamic change at the margins. London: Routledge.

Odhiambo, M. (2014) The Unrelenting Persistence of Certain Narratives: An Analysis of Changing Policy Narratives about the ASALs in Kenya. International Institute for Environment and Development Country Report. London: IIED.

Odhiambo, M. (2013) Moving beyond the rhetoric: the challenge of reform in Kenya’s drylands. London: IIED

Republic of Kenya. (2012) Vision 2030 Development Strategy for Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands. Nairobi: Government Printer.

Republic of Kenya. (2010) Sessional paper No.8 of 2012 on National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands “Releasing our Full Potential.” Unpublished.

Republic of Kenya. (1965) Sessional No. 10 of 1965 – African Socialism and its Application to Planning. Nairobi: Government Printer.

The photograph at the top was taken by the author in Kakuma, Turkana County, in June 2014. If is of an open-air church built with soil and earth bricks - the structure with the cross is the altar and the grave-like rows are the pews.

Thursday, 20 June 2024

The story of an action research project (II)

 Chapter 2: An old friend comes to the rescue


The GSD application required three referees. It was decent to let them know its fate. Later in the first week of March 2022, I shot emails to the three of them. Only one responded.

Richard Atkinson had worked for a UK-based research agency and then his own firm for over two decades. Our paths had crossed when he had come to Kenya in the 2000s to undertake what became annual lifestyle trend studies for Nokia, the then dominant mobile phone manufacturer. Between 2007 and COVID-19, Richard, his colleagues and I would conduct dozens of research projects in Liberia, Côte d'Ivore, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana and Mozambique for a raft of tech, NGO and business clients. At the time of the GSD application, Richard was teaching in the School of Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Richard in our research bunker at Mpala

Richard had obtained his PhD from Oxford University with a thesis on youth culture. Having been a quant – you should flip through my PhD thesis from page 83 – he had introduced me to ethnographic research and I was hooked. 

Professorial in mannerisms and looks – forgetful, a bit disorganised, knowledgeable, well read, bearded and with a mop of unruly hair going grey, he once appeared in our 'research bunker' with totally unmatched socks and couldn't find his sneakers on his way out, and on the final night, he left in driving rain with an umbrella and saucepan, the latter to fend off any wild animals on his walk back to his bungalow – he could turn a half hour conversation into 10 pages of text. He had been writing a book over the previous eight years based on his research experiences in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. When Communities Design Aid: Creating Solutions to Poverty That People Own, Use and Need was published in 2022 and details when and why development aid doesn’t work and concludes with proposals for community-led “Participative Development Goals.” 

Unsurprisingly, he was game – his response to my initial email included lines like “this work needs to be done…” and “give me a couple of months to think something up…” 

Sometime in May, he got back with a plan – he would start scouring UK research funding websites, in particular the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) one, for relevant grant calls. Soon, this search would identify a call to do with research with indigenous researchers and peoples. This appeared relevant given that the 2020-2023 drought had affected traditional pastoralists in Northern Kenya to a great and devastating extent. 

We began working on the bid document whose deadline was 9 August 2022, the same day as national elections in Kenya. I hit the books and journal papers once again, this time with some authority because I now considered myself an agri-pastoralist with an intense exposure to it vagaries in those dozen years in Umande where the farm was located in Laikipia East. 

Richard had recruited two RCA colleagues from the School of Design soon after the start of this proposal writing: John Makepeace, a specialist in futures methods and Gareth Loudon, Professor of Creativity and head of its Innovation Design Engineering and Global Innovation Design programmes. Zoom meetings between the four of us and Richard’s prolific writing generated pages of Google Doc text. A budget outline was beginning to take shape in the hands of John. As the Principal Investigator, Gareth’s experience, wisdom and calm delivery guided the team forward but as 9 August approached, we realised we had so much more to do and could not possibly meet the deadline. Richard, ever so sensitive, called me to ask how I felt about this. I don’t know what I said. I knew how I felt – my future looked bleaker just as the presidential and Laikipia gubernatorial election results would mirror.

We regrouped at the start of 2023. This time, the RCA team opted to go for an open call. This is a research proposal which may not fall within the specific themes put out by the research councils; applicants could conceive a project within the general remit of the council and not necessarily in response to a specific ‘brief’. There are no hard deadlines which probably informed what was to become the Future Pastoralism research proposal and project.

We identified Laikipia North as the location for the prospective work. After almost a year-long search for a local research institution for RCA to partner with, I reached out to Mpala Research Centre & Wildlife Foundation, also in Laikipia North. MRC sits within the 48,000 acre Mpala Ranch. The land was bequeathed to Princeton University by an alum in the 1980s and has been a landscape-level “living laboratory” for Princeton staff and students ever since as well as a site for local natural science researchers. It is jointly managed and operated under a trust by Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution, Kenya Wildlife Service, National Museums of Kenya and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute.

MRC is a very active and productive research institution – at the last count, they were publishing scholarly papers at the average rate of about one article each week. In 2023, they were embarking on a new strategic path which included a master plan to expand and improve physical infrastructure, hiring C-level staff and broadening the scope of research undertaken to include the humanities and social sciences. When I first contacted the newly installed Executive Director, Dr Winnie Kiiru, in March to match-make MRC and RCA, she told me that an arts / design / humanities project with the college was “music to [her] ears.” The RCA team were, later in the year, to receive an internal research development grant to fund a pilot study which we undertook in October and November 2023 working out of MRC.

John and the local research facilitation team with a participant during fieldwork in Il Motiok, Laikipia North

Tuesday, 18 June 2024

The story of an action research project (I)

Chapter 1: The Harvard GSD application

Like much of the world outside China, COVID-19 arrived in Kenya during March 2020. It could have killed me or my business. Forgivingly, it chose to do the latter.

I had maintained a research office in Nanyuki since September 2013 after emigrating from Nairobi. The small town sits on the Equator and was the headquarters of Laikipia County at the time. We were able to go into the office every weekday and some weekends until December 2020 when the landlady requested us to vacate. The hospitality business in which compound the office was located had closed down. She wanted to renovate the whole place. Admittedly, I was not reluctant to leave and get in her way.

2020 was also the start of one of the driest and longest droughts in Kenya in almost 40 years. Northern Kenya, that half of the country north of the Equator, is generally arid and bore the brunt of the drought which was to last until 2023. Grounded by the pandemic and working from home, I witnessed the effects of this particular drought at close quarters. 

We had had two previous periods of extreme dry weather in my part of Laikipia since buying the small farm in 2010. The first, around 2014, had dried up fishponds with hundreds of tilapia. Dark-to-light grey on the top, this fish tends to turn over and expose the white underside when they die. The ponds had turned cloudy.

The second drought came around in 2017. We led the cattle, goats and sheep into the fruit orchard – bananas, oranges, mangoes – and trees planted over the previous seven years. During these two droughts, I was commuting to work or away on research assignments so could not count myself as an eye witness to these events. This time, in 2020, there was nowhere to go. 

  
Views of Laikipia


Laikipia East is close to the Northwest slopes of Mt Kenya. It is under the mountain’s rain shadow and receives a less-than-adequate amount of rainfall most years. Precipitation is less in frequency and volume in most parts of Northern Kenya. This drought – as in the previous two – had dried the river which forms the northern border of the farm and from which our community water project draws its supplies. The two large elevated tanks fed by the community-sourced water and two smaller rainwater collection tanks connected to the roof of my little house were soon depleted.

The livestock had chewed – to the roots – much of the pasture on the main grazing paddock and were now browsing in the drought reserve area made up of tall grasses and shrubs. The hayfield we had planted in 2019 after the first two droughts produced a decent amount of bales – 120 – slightly less that half of which had been sold to a neighbour. The animals were soon to consume what was left.

Herders in Lekiji, Laikipia North

Amidst this climatic onslaught, I wondered how the pastoralist of Northern Kenya were fairing. Reports of animal deaths had begun appearing on mainstream and social media. Raids by pastoralists on private ranches, conservancies and farms and human deaths and injuries had been documented by investigative journalists. 

Designer and activist Victor Papanek has written about “ecological illiteracy,” describing how humans degrade natural environments expecting the damage to fix itself. Restoration of land and livelihoods gets a lot tougher when the circularity of human activity and the environmental consequences of it – by way of droughts and floods for instance – converge. It was in this milieu that I wrote, over November and December 2021, an application to join Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). 

Since my graduate student days in the early 2000s, I had occasionally – probably once a year – popped open the GSD website and marvelled at the faculty members, student profiles, facilities and programmes at the GSD. Nothing more. This time though, I went in deep. With a bias towards architecture and urban planning, there were showcases of environmental design projects as well as many other topical practice areas. 

And then there was the DDes (Doctor of Design) programme. Applications were open, closing in December with March 2022 set as the date for acceptance notices. All you had to do was write a research proposal, craft a personal statement and pay a fee. 

I hit the books and journal articles, reading up on the effects of global warming in drylands, the impacts of biodiversity loss and land degradation on wildlife habitats and pastoralists production systems, land regeneration techniques and "ecologically intentional design" (after Nathan Stegall’s philosophy). I intended to explore natural, designed and social routes to the restoration of large expanses of environmentally degraded habitats. In other words, to manipulate architecture, design and people in the service of environmentally distressed Northern Kenya. 

Having no background in and spotty knowledge of many of these fields, I reflected upon what I considered credible accounts of the most recent droughts in Kenya with my farm as the crime scene. The application generalised the effects of these droughts on Northern Kenya and what I could do about it.

On 1 March 2022, the email from GSD popped into my inbox. The message was not in the body of the email; no, you had to log into the application portal. Before doing this, I went outside and sat on the veranda, asking myself what needed to be done – at a practical level – if it was positive and what were the consequences to my professional life if it was negative. Having steeled myself, I went back indoors and logged in. The message began, “Dear Havi: We regret to inform you…” 

I stepped outside again and contemplated what I would do with the rest of my life, COVID-19 having shuttered by social research practice which I had run since 2011.