The drought in Northern Kenya (and throughout the Horn of Africa) has been a constant consideration in our work and a very real threat to the communities, landscapes and wildlife we support. As the possibility of long overdue rain began to increase over the past several weeks, a mix of hope and worry were ever present for our team and the communities we work alongside.
Even before the drops began to fall, signs of its potential arrival became more frequent, with dark clouds and distant rain showers in the distance until, finally…
“It seems [the] rains were felt across most of the Northern landscape although their intensity varies… for how long we still don’t know, though the hopes are high.”
“Happy this early morning as we found lkisin River flowing. What a surprise!!!!! It is good luck to us.”
The same challenges that threaten the survival of the Grevy’s zebra are faced by the communities who share their habitat, so our work is fully integrated with people’s needs. This is the land that they live and work on, and we work closely with them to support their vision for the future they want to see.
Our short-term interventions include working with communities to restore bare land by creating semi-circular bunds, which reduce the loss of water and fertile layers of soil. This is done in conjunction with re-seeding. As we celebrate the rain, this land restoration work is continuing and even accelerating, thanks to more partners coming in to support and scale this effort.
“Today in Namarei with the help of RC Mr Joshua and landi. We are happy to find community at the site expanding constructions of bunds and clearing reficient. After the work, we had a brief talk with the members to keep on pressing their work. It’s very impressive seeing women taking lead in restoration work. We interacted with 33 women and 5 men at the site.”
“Some bunds hold up yesterday rainfall showers in Namarei site. Today morning some community took an initiative of reseeding the sites. We borrowed grass seeds from one of the community member who once bought the seed from the world vision. 37 bunds were reseeded today and hoping to catch up the rest soonest.”
Our long-term focus is working to prevent the need for restoration by avoiding the cause of land degradation in the first place. This is through grazing management.
Our implementation, once again, is at the village level, incorporating a broad range of voices. The vision and goals of land management are not top-down but come from the communities themselves. Each demographic group (women, men, and youth) is given their own safe space to independently answer the question, “What quality of life does our community want and what needs to be in place to support that quality of life far into the future?” The groups then come together to co-create a shared vision owned by the entire community, and it is this collective vision that the Grevy’s Zebra Trust supports them to achieve.
We believe that this dual approach of physically restoring the land, combined with controlling the grazing of livestock as areas recover during the rainy season, will be a game changer for Northern Kenya, building climate change resilience for the landscape and the people and animals that live there.
