The Horn of Africa has recently faced one of the worst droughts in over forty years, resulting in the death of nearly 11 million livestock, displacement, and loss of livelihoods. The drought condition is exacerbated by the compounding structural conditions arising from protracted conflict, marginalization, malnutrition, disease, and food insecurity. Notwithstanding these challenges, pastoral livelihood has persisted and often thrived due to adaptive practices, such as strategic mobility, livestock diversifi cation, intensifying income portfolios, and investing in solidarity relationships and external support. Owing to the proliferation of transport, communication, and mobile money transactions, including in the remote pastoral villages in Northern Kenya's drylands, the adaptive capacities of the pastoralists to share information, transport produce, and engage with a growing market have improved. The customary social solidarity and redistributive practices through moral economy have rekindled, thanks to the connectivity to urban and diaspora communities. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2018 and 2024, this research re-examines social solidarities in enhancing pastoralists' capacity to withstand and transform their livelihoods in response to climate shocks. In a context characterized by a lack of financial services, restricted mobility, and limited government support, local solidarity and redistribution provide continuous access to resources, including labour and cash, to support livelihoods. The reliance on a social solidarity network allows for a more agile and timely response, not only to co-variate shocks but also to idiosyncratic pressures arising from everyday calamities. However, such practices remain unrecognized and sometimes undermined by the mainstream social provisioning, cash transfers and relief aid that provide inflexible finance with sedentary bias without considering the changing pastoral context and adaptive practices. The findings will contribute to the recent approaches to link humanitarian and development action with local resilience-enhancing practices.
Get reliable rangeland science
Toggle Search