On 10 April 2025, the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action, the Drylands Learning and Capacity Building Initiative and Kenya’s Pastoralist Parliamentary Group convened an informal dialogue among policymakers, politicians, researchers, development partners and young scholars to explore ‘grounded’ narratives on drylands in the Horn of Africa, their importance, and opportunities to enhance the prosperity and resilience of dryland communities and pastoralists through early action and targeted investment.
Organized around seven themes – peace and security, land and natural resources, pastoralist policies, youth and inclusion, livestock markets, climate change and drought, and livestock production – table groups explored critical issues, identified priority investment and policy changes and actions to advance these.
Here we summarize some key points from the various thematic discussions [download a document with fuller notes]
Discussions were framed by Darmi Jattani, graduate student at Kenyatta University in conversation with Jarso Mokku, CEO of the Drylands Learning and Capacity Building Initiative and Guyo Malicha Roba, Head of the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action.
Peace and security
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- There is an urgent need to reshape policy discourses around security in pastoralist areas. Too often, policies are crafted based on outdated narratives that fail to reflect the lived realities of pastoral communities. As a result, interventions are misaligned, mistrusted, and, ultimately, ineffective.
- Mismatches between state security tools and pastoralist ways of life fuel tensions and misunderstanding. Indigenous conflict resolution systems are not just overlooked — they’re dismissed — yet they are critical to sustain peace in these regions. Security in the drylands cannot be achieved through copy-pasted strategies. It demands shifts — in language, mindsets and approaches.
- Cross-border and inter-community conflicts over access, use, and management of natural resources in drylands (land, water, pasture, etc.) is intensified and complicated by poor land governance.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Ground security policies in new, inclusive narratives that recognize the legitimacy of pastoralist perspectives and peace mechanisms.
- Integrate pastoralists into national security structures, particularly through community-led recruitment of National Police Reservists and localized peacebuilding training.
- Amplify local understandings of security, not just as absence of violence but as coexistence, mutual respect, and community accountability.
- Challenge and reframe harmful stereotypes that shape policy and perpetuate marginalization.
- Improve community leadership in security arrangement and conflict solutions.
- Involve county government and local leadership in county security management structure.
Land and natural resources
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Tenure security and landscape stabilization are real issues that require urgent focus.
- Tenure security is currently being pursued through programs to secure communal lands and registration processes in the drylands.
- The landscapes that pastoralists occupy further require attention in terms of protection and enhancing natural regeneration to secure soils and vegetation needed for pasture and water.
- The process should be pursued in line with principles that support mobility and access to resources for the diverse communities living in the drylands.
- Access to land should be seen both as a right but also a source of long-term resilience for dryland communities.
- Natural resources in pastoral areas must benefit the local communities who occupy and draw their livelihoods in the same landscapes.
- Climate-related credits and biodiversity interests are pushing the land question into global investment debates that could negate the rights of pastoralist groups and critical need for mobility in the rangelands.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Land fragmentation is likely to follow the registration and parcellation process – a policy commitment around minimum land holding in pastoral areas is required.
- The policy should encompass securing pastoral livelihoods but also recognizing other aspirations that link to the market exchanges and are inclusive of all categories like youth and women.
Pastoralist policies
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Climate change is having drastic impacts on the livestock sector, and livestock-based economies.
- In a context of climate vulnerability, commercial interests/new forms of privatization (many linked with climate change narratives) often distract attention from more appropriate areas of investment and support, which are everyday pastoralist livelihoods, and wider systems that facilitate them.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Pastoralists themselves are the private sector. They make investments in their livelihoods and their lands all the time. They do so in contexts defined by exclusion, and long histories of very limited government investment and support.
- Good policies exist – so efforts should not always be directed towards making new policies. The key is implementation and, in general, creating an enabling environment for pastoralists, and pastoral economies, to thrive.
- We need to be more proactive about demonstrating solutions (whether in terms of policy or approach) that work for pastoralist systems. The new livestock marketing board is a key example that offers a lot of promise for pastoralists.
- An enabling environment can be created through improvements at multiple scales and levels. It involves everything from infrastructure better oriented to pastoralist needs to better access to credit for those whose primary assets are livestock.
Youth and inclusion
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Limited opportunities exist for youth, women, and people with disabilities (PWDs), often due to a lack of experience and barriers to accessing financial resources such as loans.
- Increasing drug and substance abuse in dryland regions.
- Poverty forces many young people to abandon education.
- Insufficient learning institutions result in school dropouts.
- Early pregnancies and child marriage.
- Limited or no reliable data on youth, women, and PWDs.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Promote skills development and create alternative economic opportunities for Youth, Women and PWDs.
- Ensure effective implementation of existing policies.
- Conduct regular data collection and updates on youth, women, and PWDs.
- Expand access to formal education by increasing schools and reintroducing free education.
Livestock markets
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Disconnects between supply and markets.
- Weak/no collective actions (cooperative).
- 60% livestock loss to drought, hampering livestock trade.
- Weak regulation on livestock/meat export market.
- Mismatch between upstream and downstream market connections, (usually supply and demand signals are weak or non-existent).
- Infrastructural challenges – nascence of cold chains, unfavourable road transit for livestock, animal welfare challenges.
- Safeguards needed to ensure fair relationships for pastoralists.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Strong market organization (need for a study to assess the incentive for joining cooperatives). Cooperative will offer multiple services (access to inputs, government services, financial services).
- Establish market information system for better market organization, including aligning demand and supply.
Climate change and drought
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Insufficient understanding of rangeland principles leads to maladaptation.
- Climate financing: finance for environmental restoration, criticism of carbon credits, better environmental sustainability. How can these overlapping issues be resolved
- Drought preparedness and recovery is still not far from how it was in early 2011, although we have robust data, how can that be improved?
- The intensifying gaps between building resilience and pastoralists livelihoods shocks.
- Most humanitarian interventions in drought management have made communities more vulnerable: settlement, dependency etc.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Government to provide systems for early livestock de-stocking and market access for such initiatives.
- Focus on livestock feed reserves and stimulate production of feeds in the rangelands rather than importing from other regions.
- Promote livestock subsidies as prevalent in crop agriculture.
- Adapt new ways of financing drought risk.
- Promote a broader understanding of what range management entails: production of livelihoods in the rangelands is complex and needs to be understood by both public, private and practitioners.
- Capacity building: diverse understanding of drylands narrative, need to equip policy makers on drylands and drought management.
Livestock production
Critical issues for Kenya and the Horn of Africa include:
- Pastoralists not changing with time or adjusting their production systems according to the changing climatic and environmental conditions.
- Lack of pasture development in the pastoral areas exposing the herders to scarcity of feed resulting in high livestock mortalities during drought periods.
- Lack of research in camel production and health management.
- Poor infrastructure/enabling environment (road, energy, access to finance) for livestock production and marketing.
- Inadequate resource allocation (government budget) both at national and county levels. Consequently, there is no investment in the sector – annual budget goes to largely operations.
- Failure of the pastoral production system to meet market demand in terms of quality – the livestock that are brought to the market are not of the right age and weight.
- Live animal and meat export market are not well regulated.
- Poor disease control e.g. vaccinations are often low, erratic and uncoordinated. Public resources alone cannot cover the population.
Key investment and policy commitments we want include:
- Implement Maputo declaration of allocating 10% of government budget to Agriculture, where this means livestock for the ASAL counties. Invest in the livestock sector!
- Create space for the private sector in vaccine service delivery by sharing roles. Public resources should be focused on two or three priority diseases while the rest are covered by the private sector. Additionally, public and donor funding should be directed to building the necessary vaccine delivery infrastructure.
- Be practical – move development from the boardrooms to the field – train livestock keepers, demonstrate innovations e.g. fodder production, storage and preservation.