New AgriFoSe2030 project about pastoralists in West Pokot

Could you please provide a brief description of what your project is about? And tell us what the structure of your project team looks like.

This project’s main aim is to enable more food secure and healthy pastoralist livelihoods in West Pokot, Kenya. To do this the project focuses on a few key thematic areas. This includes considering local contexts and aspects when designing and implementing food security and nutrition policies and decisions, and by enhancing the marketability and profitability of local pastoral products (particularly meat, milk, and hides), as well as improving the knowledge surrounding market regulations of crops and livestock products.

The project will be implemented between June, 2021 till May, 2023, and is a collaboration between the University of Nairobi, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and Lund University (LU). More so, it also involves other external stakeholders from the public sector, private sector, and non-governmental organisational stakeholders. From the University of Nairobi, the project will be undertaken by Dr. David Jakinda Otieno (who is the project lead) and Prof. Willis Oluoch-Kosura who are both from the Department of Agricultural Economics, together with Dr. Angela Andago from the Department of Food Science, Nutrition and Technology.

In our plan to provide internal capacity building for early career scientists, the project team also includes two PhD students (Deborah Muricho and Billy Ipara) and will also involve a few bachelors and/or masters students (on part-time basis). These students will assist in the review of policy documents, data collection, analysis, and drafting of synthesis reports.

What are the greatest challenges pastoralists in the region face in making, and improving, their livelihoods, today?

In the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (including West Pokot), there are about 25 million pastoral and 240 million agro-pastoral farmers. More so, the pastoral sector in Kenya has an economic worth of 1.13 billion USD, with 92% of this value coming from livestock activities. Yet, despite the high number of pastoralists in West Pokot, and their associated activities’ economic value, there has not been enough investment into tackling the challenges faced by these communities. Such challenges include harsh climatic conditions, together with limited and insufficient infrastructure and institutional frameworks. Droughts and food-scarcity situations have channeled government and local development partners, to focus their food security efforts on the import of dry cereals, especially maize, from other regions.

This discourages local food and nutrition security approaches which account for local resources. As such, pastoral communities are denied investments toward resilience building based around local dietary preferences and local products, products that are readily available and constitute the cultural heritage of the West Pokot community.

This situation is worsened by the low technical capacity of local community groups and institutions in the West Pokot region. These groups hence struggle to effectively participate in targeted policymaking to address these challenges. As a result, existing policies, development, and investment plans, as well as emergency responses seldom incorporate local people’s indigenous knowledge, or local dietary preferences.

What steps are you taking in your project to transform pastoral livelihoods?

The project has four objectives, which apply to the West Pokot region, and which are as follows:

1. To contribute toward policy change which would ensure the local contextualisation of plans and interventions which regard food and nutrition security.
2. To strengthen the capacity of pastoral and agro-pastoral cooperatives, in order to ensure increased value addition of livestock products.
3. To improve the knowledge on the standards and regulations which encircle livestock value chains amongst pastoralist institutions, as well as to build their capacities toward complying with these said standards and regulations.
4. To improve the profitability and market access of crop and livestock products from pastoral areas.

What is happening in the project now and what next steps will be taken?

To start off, the project began with consultative meetings between the University of Nairobi team members and the Swedish university teams in June and July of 2021. These meetings resulted in the development of the project’s Theory of Change (ToC). Later on in August, the project team visited West Pokot County to engage in a number of activities, which included:

1. Inception meetings with stakeholders – these were necessary for purposes of informing the stakeholders about the aim of the project, identifying the critical needs, and finding agreement on how to implement the project activities.
2. Identification of relevant policy documents to the project amongst local policy stakeholders- especially the County Government officials. Such documents are useful toward understanding current levels of food and nutrition security, and the strategies which exist to address these areas, before project activities begin.
3. Baseline survey with individual households to provide pre-project situation on key indicators against which the project performance will be assessed later.

For the next steps of the project, this will first of all include a review and update of the project’s ToC. Additionally, our project members will focus on synthesising the material and data collected during the summer months, which regards the policy documents and review reports, together with the baseline survey data. By the end of December 2021, our team expects to have completed our design of training materials for food and nutrition demonstrations/shows.

Group photo of participants in a stakeholder meeting in West Pokot. Photo courtesy of Dr. David Jakinda Otieno.