Speaking at the June 2025 International Rangelands Congress, Jameel Observatory scholar Tahira Mohamed contrasts the roles of more formal, external, social support and protection systems with more informal community-based solidarity relationships, arguing that for the various forms should be broughts together in mutually reinforcing ways that reflect the ground realities of pastoralist communities.
Dealing with drought
Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa recently lived through one of the worst droughts in over forty years, resulting in the death of nearly 11 million livestock, displacement, and loss of livelihoods.
Over time, such disasters attracted many humanitarian and development interventions – including emergency food aid, cash assistance, rangeland rehabilitation, market infrastructure development, and projects that support diversification out of pastoralism. More recently, ‘resilience building’ is topping many agendas, with pastoralists receiving market infrastructure development, rehabilitation of water systems and investment in social protection, specifically cash transfers and livestock insurance, as a route to de-risking pastoral settings.
Alongside these externally driven interventions, pastoralist communities themselves implement their own adaptive and response strategies to manage uncertainties and risk, including strategic mobility, livestock diversification, intensifying income portfolios, and investing in solidarity relationships.
Jameel Observatory scholar Tahira Mohamed has been examining these informal solidarity relationships – founded on cultural norms and values or rooted in religious obligations – and the concept of moral economy – where primary motivations are based on social norms, obligations, and the common good, exploring their contributions to drought and disaster resilience and how these interact with classic formal support interventions.
Grounding relief and resilience interventions
In a recent paper presented at the International Rangelands Congress, she argues that pastoralist communities, typically living in situations characterized by few financial services, restricted mobility and limited government support, rely on these local solidarity networks to provide the necessary agile, timely and relevant responses that communities need. However, such practices are overlooked by government and other formal actors, and they are sometimes undermined by mainstream social provisioning, cash transfers and relief aid.
Contrasting these informal and formal resilience support systems, while recognizing the contributions of interventions like social protection or insurance, she observes that formal systems are often disconnected from locally based pastoralist response systems: First, individually focused interventions that characterize external intervention do not match the ways that pastoralist properties and assets are collectively owned and managed. Second, formal assistance is often tied to quotas, fixed amounts and predictive targeting that is not well suited to mobile pastoralist communities and thus is likely to exclude many eligible households. Third, overlapping and inconsistent social provisioning interventions, especially around severe drought, creates confusion for pastoralists but also for government entities as well.
Looking forward in a region grappling with poly-crises, climate change, conflict and structural problems, she calls for the various forms of external and local assistance to be brought together in mutually reinforcing ways that reflect the ground realities of pastoralist communities.
More
Mohamed, Tahira Shariff. 2025. Resilience in practice: Re-examining social assistance and collective solidarity for climate change adaptation. IN: McDonald, S. et al. 2025. Proceedings of the 12th International Rangeland Congress, Adelaide, Australia, 2-6 June 2025. Adelaide, Australia: International Rangeland Congress. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174951 / Watch a recording of her presentation
Mohamed, Tahira Shariff. 2025. Pathways to resilient livelihoods: Lesson from social protection and moral economy perspective in East Africa’s Drylands. Presented at the Spring seminar, Cornell University Institute of African Development, 17 April 2025. Nairobi: International Livestock Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174518
Derbyshire, S.F., Banerjee, R.R., Mohamed, T.S. and Roba, G.M. 2024. Uncertainty, pastoral knowledge and early warning: A review of drought management in the drylands, with insights from northern Kenya. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 14:13006. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2024.13006
Mohamed, T.S., Crane, T.A., Derbyshire, S.F. and Roba, G.M. 2025. A review of approaches to the integration of humanitarian and development aid: the case of drought management in the Horn of Africa. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 15: 14001. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2025.14001
Mohamed, T.S., Crane, T.A., Roba, G., Derbyshire, S. and Banerjee, R. 2024. Breaking down silos: Towards effective integration of resilience and humanitarian aid in the Horn of Africa. ILRI Workshop Brief. Nairobi, Kenya: ILRI. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/151962
Jameel Observatory. 2023. Response, Recovery, Resilience – how dryland communities manage climate shocks
Mohamed, T.S. 2022. The role of the moral economy in response to uncertainty among Borana pastoralists of Northern Kenya, Isiolo County. PhD Thesis. Brighton, UK: University of Sussex.