ABDILLAHI A. ABOUD

The Njemps (II-Chamus) and Tugen herders of the dry Baringo lowlands in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya have been frequently devastated by droughts during the past 20 years, resulting in large losses of cattle, and food-related miseries. Vulnerability to drought has traditionally been the major cause of transitory food insecurity in Baringo District.

Frequent drought is an important ecological characteristic of Kenya’s arid and semi-arid rangelands. Bernsten & Jacobs (1983) assert that such drought takes three forms — localized, regional, and national — and each varies enormously in intensity. They conclude that there is seldom a year in Kenya’s rangelands when some part is not suffering a drought.

Besides drought, other factors contribute to impoverishment of herders in Baringo. These predominantly include political-economic factors such as herders’ marginalization and a development bias for agriculture over pastoralism (Horowitz & Little 1987).

The natural tendency of governments and NGOs sympathetic to the food insecurity of the herders in the rangelands is to provide famine relief and/or food-for-work (FFW). The UNICEF for instance has been working with government, non-government organizations (NGOs), churches and communities to provide emergency relief to drought-stricken populations in these areas (GOK-UNICEF 1993). Baringo’s food-for-work project was conceived both as a temporary assistance program for meeting basic food needs of targeted low-income households, and as a longer term development tool for using ‘surplus’ labour for building infrastructure and providing income to ease capital constraints for farm production (Bezuneh et al. 1985).

While the Baringo food-for-work efforts were intended to mitigate the recurrent drought crises, recent evaluations have described such efforts as offering only temporary relief and ineffectiveness in assisting herders to cope with stress. Bezuneh et al. (1985) considered household labour reallocation to food-for-work projects to be detrimental to overall food production. Munyes (1993) in contrast, associates food aid with a dependency which generates laziness and erodes people’s self-help capability. Innovative strategies are therefore desperately needed to address the longer-term issue of how to mitigate recurrent drought and food insecurity and to establish an autarky, or means of economic self-sufficiency.

This paper proposes an innovative model, based on building community capacity, to mitigate drought-related miseries among Baringo herders and to make them independent and self-sustained.

The elements of the model include improvements in rangeland resource conservation, diversified animal production, marketing, household-level savings mobilization, and community investment, all undertaken on a cooperative basis using village clusters. Systematically, the implementation method could follow these eight steps.

1. Start with participatory action research to explore and provide insight into how such a model can best be organized and implemented.
   
2. The use Participatory Rural Appraisal to sensitize the population to the need for, and nature of, cooperative organization, defining people’s individual and group involvement, responsibilities and leadership roles.
   
3. Through food-for-work arrangements and incentives, mobilize the people, communally, to plan and undertake soil and water conservation measures in identified pastures in traditional grazing lands, with simultaneous reseeding of adaptable grass species for milk-stock raising, and leguminous fodder shrubs and multipurpose trees for small stock browse and fuelwood production.
   
4. With reasonable forage stands, introduce milk cows and small ruminants, with numbers dictated by the carrying capacity of rehabilitated pastures. Households would be allowed to graze an equal number of milk animals for family subsistence, while small stock would constitute a central herd contributed by each household in the form of shares. Livestock production would be used for commercial purposes to generate operational income for the cooperative and payment of dividends.
   
5. Gradually introduce other income-generating activities, such as poultry, bee keeping and handicraft manufacturing, both on a communal and on an individual basis.
   
6. Explore and establish lucrative markets in urban centres for the people’s products.
   
7. Set up bank accounts and credit facilities for the cooperative and the people, with gradual phasing-in of local community-based credit unions.
   
8. Plan and implement community education and training to address the administrative and technical activities of the project, emphasizing sustained production and profits with special attention to environmental health.

Effectively implemented, the project could benefit the members individually and collectively so they learn to rehabilitate, protect, and sustain the productivity of their rangelands, raise livestock and multipurpose trees, and take up other trades for subsistence and commercial purposes. In this process, members would improve their nutrition and health, open up markets and interact with the outside world, enhance their income levels, learn to invest in business and save the surplus, create employment for themselves and establish self-sufficiency in their region, and most importantly, as a consequence of all the above, learn to manage the risks of drought.

The food-aid programs intended to alleviate problems associated with persistent droughts in the Baringo lowlands have been ineffective and provided only temporary relief. Worse still they have tended to perpetuate people’s dependency on food-aid and eroded their capacity to help themselves (Munyes 1993).

The proposed innovative model aims at building the community capacity to cope with the effects and consequences of droughts. The model encompasses the elements of risk management, including asset, production and income diversification, increased access to information, and increased access to external resources and markets.

Some prerequisites for effective implementation of the model include: (i) effective implementation of a better-planned food-for-work program to provide incentives for people to participate in soil and water conservation and range rehabilitation activities; (ii) an effective extension program to educate and train people in project activities and leadership roles; (iii) a detailed plan of operation supported by an adequate budget to cover the first five-year phase, to include mechanisms of gradual handing over of the project to the community by the end of that period; (iv) involvement of all relevant government departments, NGOs and interested parties in the planning and implementation of the project; (v) full endorsement and support by the community, resulting from the use of participatory approaches to plan, implement and evaluate the project; (vi) a strong management team including a management committee, project coordinator, manager, and support staff, all employed by the project, and provided with necessary logistics including adequate transportation, equipment, offices and buildings, etc.; (vii) a sponsor(s) to finance the first five-year development phase; and (viii) a capacity to advocate and influence local and national policy, planning and institutions for fostering sustainable use of rangelands.

Profound gratitude to Dr. Layne Coppock and Dr. Peter Little for their constructive suggestions and assistance. Ms. Rae Ann Hart also helped with manuscript preparation. Funding to attend this International Rangeland Congress has been provided by the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program (GL CRSP), under the auspices of the Global Bureau of the US Agency for International Development, grant no. DAN-1382-G-00-0046-00.