Pastoralists’ high reliability networks are critical for building resilience

Rahma Hassan, Ian Scoones, Elizabeth Stites, Hussein Wario and Jackson Wachira

Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa are emerging from a devastating three-year drought. Structural challenges—including conflict, loss of grazing lands, and restrictions on herd mobility—further exacerbate droughts’ effects. The result has been decline in livestock productivity, animal deaths, food insecurity and acute malnutrition. Despite these impacts, the resilience inherent in these pastoral systems has allowed communities to start on the road to recovery.   

As part of our action research project ‘Resilience from Below’ funded by the Australian Centre for International and Agricultural Research and the Tufts University Feinstein International Center’s research on early warning and humanitarian response at the Centre for Research and Development in the Drylands, in this blog we explore pastoralists’ own systems that support their daily decisions and future planning. These systems allow pastoral communities to manage uncertainties and take advantage of opportunities. We explore local networks and the repertoire of knowledge and practices that are critical for pastoralism. We also  highlight our emerging findings on the importance of ‘high reliability professionals’ in contributing to the resilience of pastoral systems.

Exploring pastoralists’ high reliability networks

The return of rains in 2023 across most of Northern Kenya has revitalized depleted pasture and water sources, but pastoralist communities continue to experience severe effects of the last drought. While this multi-year drought was extreme, these areas are traditionally characterized by ecological and climatic uncertainty and variability. Living with and from uncertainty requires mobilising different sources of knowledge, such as immediate day-to-day and seasonal changes that may affect capacities to manage livestock. This knowledge-gathering and sense-making for action requires high reliability knowledge networks that are rooted in relations among diverse people.

Pastoralism can be seen as a ‘critical infrastructure’ that must provide a sustained, stable flow of goods and services, just like an electricity or water supply system. Like control room operators in other critical infrastructures, pastoralists must reduce high input variability to realise stable outputs by deploying an array of strategies. During individual and group discussions with communities across Isiolo and Marsabit counties, pastoralists recognised the important role of their  capacities and resources to sustain their livelihoods and avert disasters. Reliability professionals such as herders, motorcyle drivers and agrovet dealers, together with their networks are crucial in this, providing information on future scenarios, combined with real time actions to respond to uncertainties. For pastoralists, reliability practices involve providing early warning, locating good pasture and water resources, securing supplementary fodder, managing markets and securing peace and security in the face of conflict. The following sections offer some insights from our preliminary fieldwork.

Deliberating on early warning information

While there have been huge external investments in early warning in the drylands, pastoralists have on their own been mobilising different sources of knowledge to plan for possible futures even when they are unpredictable. Pastoralists’ local knowledge on early warning shows their ability to assess shortand long-term ecological trends. The art or skill of assessing conditions and making predictions has been accumulated across generations by  individuals who work within networks. One such high reliability professional is the ‘Uchu’.

For instance, in Bori (a small settlement about 45 minutes drive from Moyale town) community, members recall the messages that the local female early warning expert, the ‘Uchu’, had relayed prior to the recent drought based on her skilled reading of animal intestines. Early warning from intestine reading,interpretation of the stars, carefully observing animal behaviour and the pattern of clouds or direction of the wind, are widespread practices among pastoral groups. These sources of information form the basis of discussion on what the community should expect and plan for. In the Bori case, the now late female ‘Uchu’ had seen signs of multiple failed rainy seasons to come. Such early warning information is shared and combined with different sources such as national meteorological office, government bulletins and radio programmes  Very often local experts differ in their forecasts, making discussion about the forecasts essential.

The future is always uncertain, meaning that even scientific predictions and associated recommendations are often inaccurate. As such, these sources are often not trusted or considered reliable. From the community perspective, it is much better to discuss options based on different sources of information and decide yourself depending on your circumstances. As such, high reliability professionals like ‘Uchus’ offer the opportunity for communities to debate and take different actions. These processes of information gathering, sharing and—crucially-- deliberating are critical for knowledge and preparedness within the pastoral system.

Seeking out pasture and water

Pastoralists’ knowledge and skills on grazing routes and strategic mobility is critical for the variable environments they occupy. Important knowledge networks are crucial for scouting and identifying grazing areas during dry seasons. These knowledge networks become particularly critical when normal grazing areas or movement routes are not feasible due to drought or conflict; new information is required to sustain the herd.  In different pastoralist villages near Sololo in Marsabit, elders indicate that specific individuals have  skills of identifying areas that are best suited for grazing, the types of pasture and specific shrubs that are highly nutritious and therefore critical for livestock during droughts.

Motorbike riders support this surveillance of grazing areas by ensuring  faster access  while covering longer distances. Their role goes beyond offering transport: they support their communities to make decisions on mobilty in real time. The system of mobility relies on communal principles that allow access to land and water. These flexible and reciprocal arrangements that support pastoral movement and access to pasture are mediated by elders who hold positions in the community and therefore determine critical moments for the community to seek help from neighbours.

The high reliability professionals who support decision-making around pasture knowledge provide pastoralists with opportunities to plan ahead and mitigate losses by providing information and mediating access to the much-needed pasture and water when the rainy seasons fail, the water pans dry up and the pressure for water mounts in the northern Kenya drylands. Community elders are thus critical in identifying strategic water sources for human and livestock consumption. In Kulamawe, the elders describe an elaborate system where specific elders are tasked with  locking and unlocking  boreholes,and managing  rotational grazing and watering of animals.

Critical to this practice are the owners of donkey carts who offer transport services by ferrying water closer to the herd during  drought. This is a crucial service when livestock become weak and unable to move long distances to access water. While individuals in the community sometimes own or hire motorcycles to support their livestock, the community networks that support the transportation of water and other services for multiple people or herds are coordinated and supported by respected high reliability professionals at the centre of the community.

In Dokatu,Marsabit Central, we met a group that has worked together to support their livelihoods after the loss of livestock during the last drought. Through the support of an external donor, they are engaging in gardening supported by a well-connected source of borehole water. One of the significant ways in which the group is sustaining the movement of fodder and farm produce is through a three wheeled motorbike, the size of a small truck christened tuk tuk. It can ferry goods from the highlands (where markets and fodder are available) to the lowlands where Dokatu is located. The community narrated how the leadership of the group encouraged them to start a community self-help group, first to attract the external funding, but also to determine what type of funding or support they would receive. During the drought, they requested transport instead of the restocking programme offered by the donor, aware that transport would increase their ability to survive and thrive. A cohesive group, built on trust, combined with strong leaders who could draw on established networks among the donors (due to past employment), proved crucial in realising what was needed in order to support resilience on their own terms.

Securing emergency fodder sources

One of the critical services needed by pastoralists are sources of fodder to sustain herds during droughts. In Rapsu, an agropastoral setting in Isiolo County, we met a community group engaging in a fodder production and storage project and small-scale irrigated farming. Such fodder production groups  play a critical role in sustaining the pastoral system.

We also met a community member who is skilled in harvesting specific wild tubers which proved to be an important supplement for livestock during the drought. Locating, harvesting and then feeding these tubers to livestock require a lot of skill and knowledge. In this case, this practice was learned from neighbouring pastoral communities and was then shared locally. As a key member of the grazing committee, the herder was an important source of knowledge and assistance during the drought.

Managing access to markets

Despite access to markets being critical for pastoralists in the sale of livestock and livestock products, markets are uncertain, with volatile prices and unstable demand. This makes managing access to markets a critical reliability management task, so that live animals, meat or milk can be sold to generate stable sources of income.

Milking tasks have long been done by women in pastoral settings and, as such, women groups engaging in milk businesses have grown, especially due to increased demand for specific products like camel milk. Managing the camel milk trade requires  high reliability skills, supported by extended networks. For example, a group of women in Kulamawe have  organised themselves as a cooperative and through external support are working together to collect, preserve and transport camel milk. This collective organisation remains a critical link to women’s moral economy. Collectively the women also build solidarity groups with men, by supporting their activities including distributing cool water from the milk coolers during Ramadhan. This remains an important link to the broader pastoral economy making women critical to wider reliability networks.

Local shopkeepers also play a key role in supplying household goods within the community. In Bori, community members shared how credit facilities provided by the shopkeepers are an important service during droughts. The shopkeepers offer credit to specific people who they have close connections with, including beneficiaries of cash transfers. Women’s groups then pay back the debt once they make their sales or cash transfers.

Assuring peace and security

Peace and security are critical requirements for a sustainable pastoral livelihood. With dwindling pasture and water resources, there is increased likelihood of conflict in pastoral areas. Traditional rules of support and redistribution are still effective in areas like Kulamawe, where elders organise security for grazing areas and water resources. Given the pressure from other pastoral groups, young men are sent to carry out surveillance with community members' contribution involving fueling the motorbikes and sustaining the upkeep of the young men.

Building resilience from below

The previous sections have offered some examples of reliability professionals and networks around a range of core functions of successful pastoralism. In future work, we need to interrogate these dynamics further, exploring how networks are formed, the spaces where deliberations over reliability occur and the connections to external networks and support. These reliability networks go beyond the local communities and are reliant on cross-border exchanges and links with the state, NGOs and donors.  

Our initial research reveals how reliability professionals and their networks are central to building resilience and averting disasters in pastoral systems. They connect herders and others through diverse social networks, for example, with motorbike transporters, those who offer credit, and local specialists such as healers and forecasters. Of course such systems of  promoting reliability and resilience do not always work. Future work must examine what is successful and what is not and the reasons for this, and in turn explore whether limited and well-designed external support can assist existing, local processes in building resilience from below.

In the coming years, through the action-research project that CRDD is leading, together with other partners in Marsabit and Isiolo counties, we aim to ask these questions and test  alternatives on the ground, learning from real-time experiences. Rather than imposing a narrow approach to resilience with a standard suite of projects, perhaps an alternative approach to resilience building from below can emerge.

About the authors

This post was prepared by Rahma Hassan (Feinstein International Centre and CRDD), Ian Scoones (IDS,University of Sussex), Elizabeth Stites (Feinstein International Centre, Tufts University), Hussein Wario (CRDD) and Jackson Wachira (CRDD)

Acknowledgement

The fieldwork from which this blog is written was undertaken as part of two projects implemented by the Centre for Research and Development in the Drylands (CRDD): The Resilience from Below Project financed by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Re-examining Early Warning Systems and Humanitarian Responses in Pastoral Areas of the Sudano-Sahel and the Greater Horn of Africa project funded by the USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Change (BHA) co-implemented with the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University. The authors are grateful for this funding and partnership.

Photo credit: Jackson Wachira