Articles

The call for applications for the February 2025 Summer School on Building Resilience from Below in the Face of Chronic Uncertainty in the Drylands has now closed. We are thrilled to announce that we received over 200 applications from Master’s and PhD students across Kenya and the Horn of Africa. Succesful Candidates will be notified before the end of 2024. […]

Roble Muse and Kelvin Mugambi, March 2025 Why, after years of resilience programming, are we seeing more dependency on aid in the horn’s drylands? The Horn of Africa is no stranger to crises. For decades, the region has faced recurring droughts, food insecurity, and conflict, leaving millions in need of repeated life-saving humanitarian interventions over […]

Experiences from the Drylands Summer School 2025. By Grace Anyango Ouma Research and policy agree that there is still need for gender mainstreaming in adaptation policy. This is especially true for pastoralist women who are among the most impacted by global climate change. Therefore, as a qualitative researcher who enjoys asking ‘why?’ around issues, I […]

Reflections from the Drylands Summer School 2025 Darmi Jattani and Jackson Wachira Pastoralism is a product of climate change. It is an adaptive strategy in a highly variable environment. Over centuries, pastoralism has evolved through global environmental shifts, proving itself as a highly dynamic and resilient livelihood system. It is not merely about livestock herding as […]

Held from 23rd February -1st March 2025 at Camp Simpirre, Gotu (Isiolo) Kenya Preamble We, the student-participants, gathered for the inaugural summer school reaffirm our commitment to advocating for the new narratives of pastoralism that espouse community-centered approaches and processes in policy, development, and humanitarian interventions. Recognizing pastoralism as the most viable production system in the […]

I want to give a quick overview of some of the key questions and challenges we face in this area, in order to set the scene for the workshop. Over the last decades, there have been huge investments in addressing disasters in the drylands of eastern Africa. You only have to travel around northern Kenya […]

Despite the devastating impacts of a three-year drought, the resilience inherent in pastoral systems is paving the way for recovery, as we explore in our action research project ‘Resilience from Below’.

Facing variability and insecurity due to climate change as well as environmental and human-generated shocks and uncertainties, policies on East Africa’s drylands need a ‘reset’ – where pastoralism is recognized and not renegotiated; where community resilience and reliability are valued and prized, and where actions and investments of governments and agencies are re-connected to local […]

CRDD, the Jameel Observatory, and the Feinstein International Centre are convening a dialogue to bridge policy and practice gaps in building resilience for pastoralists facing climate-related shocks, focusing on coordinated early warning, anticipatory action, and humanitarian responses.