Kenyan herders on the edge after record drought

Alice Koono Nangor, 35, cannot remember a drought as long or as severe as the one that has blighted her community in recent years. “When I was young,” she says, “the droughts used to last six months, sometimes up to a year. This one has now lasted more than four years.
“Throughout that time we’ve had rain for a day or two, but it’s never been enough to bring the vegetation back. I can’t even recall the number of livestock we’ve lost. Our farms have gone dry. When we get some rain we try to grow crops, but when there’s no more they just dry up.”
Koono Nangor lives in Loima, a hamlet of palm-roofed huts in northern Kenya. In the distance, the Ugandan hills are dark green, but the land around Loima is sandy scrub. Normally, the region has two rainy spells a year — a heavier one from March to May, and a lighter one in November and December.It’s normal for one or two of these rainy seasons to fail. For thousands of years, people have roamed the landscape with goats, cows and camels in search of scarce pasture.
But in recent years, this precarious lifestyle has grown all the more untenable, as more severe droughts arrive more frequently. Of the 17 that have hit Kenya since 1965, five occurred between 2011 and 2019. Then, in late 2020, the region’s severest drought on record started. Across northern Kenya and neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia, it has killed nine million livestock, and plunged four million people into acute food insecurity.
“East Africa is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe,” says Shashwat Saraf, East Africa regional emergency director for the International Rescue Committee, the aid and development organisation. “The worst drought in 40 years makes severe malnutrition, livestock loss, food and water shortages and displacement a daily reality for 40 million people in the region.”
This situation — which the Kenyan government declared an emergency in September 2021 — is a window onto the inhospitable future the region faces as climate change intensifies. In April this year, scientists at Imperial College London found that climate change had made the drought 100 times likelier, calling this a “conservative” estimate. They found that scarce as the rains have been, they would have been enough to avert a drought in a climate unwarmed by human activity.
According to the Kenyan climatologist Joyce Kimutai, one of the authors of the study, the climate of eastern Africa is becoming dominated by “extensive periods of drought and short intense rainfall. In the last 20 years there hasn’t been a season with normal conditions.”
On the day I visit in early November, Loima has just enjoyed its first rains since March, and the River Turkwel is flowing full, fast and brown. Its waters make the village an important waypoint for pastoralists bringing their flocks east from Uganda, but for much of the past four years it has been reduced to a trickle. Herders who have already lost many animals along the way have had to make their animals queue to drink the little that remains. They are tempting prey for the crocodiles that come when the river level falls.
Livestock are the basis of the economy in Loima, and losing so many animals has forced its residents to cut back on food. Koono Nangor recalls a time when, having sold her scrawny goats for less than she had hoped, she was unable to buy enough food for her family. On her return home, her husband beat her.
She has four children, the oldest of whom is ten. Underfed at home, they have gone scavenging for palm fruits. Hard on the outside and bitter and fibrous in the middle, these dark red fruits give them indigestion. They have also stolen maize from a farm along the river. When the farmer found out, he came to her house to take one of her goats. Her husband was furious.
Perhaps the drought’s direst effect has been on the village’s supply of drinking water. They used to get it from the river, but last year the charity World Vision dug the village a borehole, giving them a cleaner, more convenient source of water. In March, however, the pump broke. Local agents of the International Rescue Committee are helping to repair it. They believe the drought was partly responsible. They think the groundwater fell too low to keep the pump’s motor cool.
Until it is fixed the people of Loima are forced back to the river. “It’s not clean,” says Koono Nangor. “Children come to play there, and they defecate in it. It’s giving people fever.” She adds that the problem has got worse as other water sources have dried up, forcing people to come to the river from further afield.
“When we had the borehole, we had an easy time,” says Sylvester De Lelele, a local former chief who is now the vice-chairman of Loima’s water committee. “It meant we didn’t have to walk down to the river, and it also piped water into our health centre.
“A long time ago, when I was young, the weather here wasn’t so bad, but now it’s so harsh. If it keeps on getting hotter, people will still live here. They don’t have anywhere else to go. But if we can fix the pump, and do a bit of irrigation here, then people will be able to feed their animals with sorghum and maize. The animals won’t be dying any more. They’ll have easy water, and then they can go looking for pasture.”
It’s not just the herders who have borne the brunt of the drought. Forty miles northeast along the river is the regional capital of Lodwar, a town of about 80,000 people. Here life is visibly more modern; rather than herds of goats, the streets are filled with motorbikes, and rather than earthen huts there are pastel-painted shopfronts with a range of consumer goods. But while Lodwar may look more prosperous than Loima, the drought has caused many of its residents to slip through the cracks of urban life.
According to Fatima Nluspan, a 40-year-old baker who learnt her trade at the local women’s empowerment centre run by the IRC, the town is full of men who, depressed at the loss of livestock and work, have turned to substance abuse. Worse, she says, some families are so desperate that they have sent their teenage daughters on to the streets as prostitutes.
For her too, the worst effect of the drought has been on the supply of drinking water. Before the drought, Nluspan would pay 350 Kenyan shillings (about £1.80) a month for as much water as she wanted from the communal taps. Now, those taps are rarely running for more than one week in every four, and when they are not, she has to buy water in containers at one shilling a litre. Her family uses 100 litres a day — ten litres each — meaning they are spending more in four days than they used to in a month.
To afford this, they have cut back on food, often eating one meal a day. Even then, there isn’t enough water for washing up, with the result that her children have become ill from eating off dirty plates.Nluspan is hopeful that the recent rains herald the end of the drought, and she may well be right. The La Niña weather pattern which helped drive the drought over the past four years is giving way to the wetter El Niño, and unusually heavy rains are forecast.
However, Kimutai, the climatologist, cautions that rain hitting dry, hard ground is a recipe for flash floods. The recent rains in Loima have also caused flooding in regions to the south and east, displacing more than 13,000 people, according to the charity Acted.
Kimutai believes this oscillation between drought and flooding will only worsen as the climate warms. She says that, depending on how much more human activity warms the climate, “we could see these droughts running longer than five rainy seasons. It could be seven seasons, it could be ten seasons.“The Horn of Africa is going to be hit really, really hard in the future. It will just be seasons of droughts and floods, and I don’t think that’s an environment people will thrive in. I don’t think it’s an environment that will continue to sustain livestock or crops. For the communities that are living there, I don’t think in 50 years’ time they will still call that place home.”
She wants Cop28 to discuss phasing out fossil fuels. “It’s time. We have to stop the warming.”