Kenya: As Drought Deepens Land Conflicts, Peacebuilders Respond

Sep 24, 2022 | Jeremy Moore
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Amid lengthening droughts in a changing climate, millions of herders in northern Kenya are watching their traditional grazing lands dry and harden. Communities’ new desperation from drought intensifies old land disputes reaching back to Kenya’s colonization by Britain. Much as in the Americas and Australia, the European colonists took the most desirable lands, using disputed treaties and armed force to drive indigenous peoples to less fertile regions. But at the grass roots of northern Kenyan society, activists are combining local knowledge and peacebuilding skills to create new ways for rival groups to cooperatively adapt to the changes from a degrading climate.

IMPACT “knew the traditional methods that the Samburu and Il-Ngwesi use to manage land and also conflict,” Karmushu said, and began dialogues in both communities to shape a peace process consonant with those traditions. IMPACT has helped six communities win title to lands they now use. Another priority is to help communities adapt to the climatic degradation of lands and build more reliable livelihoods.

Such grassroots efforts in northern Kenya are often overshadowed by the region’s more widely known conservation trusts, many established on the vast grassland-and-forest ranches created by white colonists.