Maasai livestock scientist picked for Kenya governor

Kitengela rangeland: Maasai scientist David Nkedianye (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

Livestock scientist David Nkedianye was on Wednesday 27 March 2013 sworn in as the first governor of Kajiado County, in Kenya. Elected in the country’s general election of 4 March 2013, Nkedianye, a Maasai, beat seven candidates to become governor under a new political dispensation that devolved significant power from a central government to 47 county governments, each headed by a governor.

The ILRI -trained scientist and former teacher was initially picked by the Kajiado County professionals as the preferred candidate for governor by a team that scrutinized the history of the candidates and what they had done to improve the lives of communities living in the county. During his time as an ILRI scholar, he researched issues in his home area, the Kitengela rangelands, home of Maasai pastoralists, about an hour’s drive southeast of Nairobi, working to better understand the interaction between Maasai herders, livestock and wildlife as well as land use in the county. He worked closely with the community and helped to establish an NGO called ‘Reto-o-Reto’ (Maasai for ‘I help you, you help me’), which started as a research project conducted jointly by ILRI and Maasai communities in East Africa.

That five-year project (2003–2008) experimented with boundary-spanning research to help balance action in poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in four pastoral ecosystems in East Africa, including the Kitengela pastoral ecosystem just south of Nairobi National Park. Nkedianye co-authored a scientific paper generated by this project entitled ‘Evolution of models to support community and policy action with science: Balancing pastoral livelihoods and wildlife conservation in savannas of East Africa’, which was published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious American science journal.

The paper won the 2012 Sustainability Science Award, which is given annually by the Ecological Society of America to the authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in the preceding five years that makes the greatest contribution to the emerging science of ecosystem and regional sustainability through the integration of ecological and social sciences.

At the community level, Nkedianye chairs the Kajiado Community Task Force, whose mandate is to implement the Kitengela/Isinya/Kipeto Land Use Master Plan (LUMP), the first of its kind in Kenya. Because his efforts and those of his teams, subdivision of land in Kitengela is now capped at 60 to 80 acres, which is helping to stop the mushrooming of unplanned settlements and the uneconomic subdivision of these rangelands.

He graduated with a PhD in ecology and natural resource management at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, in 2010. during his time at ILRI, he spent time with ILRI partner William Clark as his faculty host at the Harvard J.F. Kennedy School of Government in 2007 in  the Sustainability Science Program.

Kajiado lies just southeast of Nairobi and is both a cosmopolitan and rural county. Some have dubbed it the bedroom of Nairobi due to its close proximity to the city and with many of the city’s residents renting homes and commuting from there. Yet it remains rural and home to many pastoralists who have suffered human-wildlife conflicts and survived some of the worst droughts in the region. Harmonizing these dichotomies are some of the challenges that the new governor will have to deal with.

Nickson Ole Parmisa, a community leader in Kitengela who worked with Nkedianye during his time at ILRI, says: ‘We appreciate David’s effort and struggle to save Kitengela lands and pastoralist community. We hope now that the “land use master plan” our community developed will be fully implemented. I think local people have been praying for this, and they and wildlife and livestock will all benefit.’

Nkedianye says he has used his knowledge from his years of research work with ILRI and others to increase ‘rights awareness’ and to determine pastoral land ownership, access and use by the community.

Shirley Tarawali, Nkedianye’s research director in ILRI’s ‘People, Livestock and the Environment Theme’, who now serves ILRI as director of Institutional Planning and Partnerships, says, ‘David is well placed now to do much to get livestock and other research into real good use in Kenya. We congratulate him on his many achievements, and look forward to working with him for the betterment of poor pastoral herders.’ See related stories at http://peoplelivestockenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/ilri-pastoral-research-team-wins-sustainable-science-award/

http://www.ilri.org/ilrinews/index.php/archives/tag/reto-o-reto-research-project

http://peoplelivestockenvironment.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/nkedianye-successfully-completes-his-phd/

 

Natural Resources expert joins ILRIs People Livestock and the environment team

Lance W. Robinson has joined ILRIs People Livestock and the Environment theme as post-doctoral scientist based in Nairobi. He will be working with the team Reducing Vulnerability of Livestock Based Livelihoods working on climate change and the vulnerability of marginal systems and peoples.

His areas of expertise include capacity strengthening, drylands, environment, livelihoods, pastoralism, resilience and water.  Consequently, he will be linked to two CRPs – CGIAR Research Program on climate change, agriculture and food security and the CGIAR Research Program on integrated agricultural production systems for the dry areas.

Lance has over ten years’ experience working with NGOs and as a consultant in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He has worked in environmental governance and social-ecological resilience in pastoralist systems. His PhD research among Kenyan pastoralists focused on the connection between social-ecological resilience and the approaches to participation used by formal sector agencies working with pastoralists. Since completing his PhD, his research work has centered on participatory and community-based approaches to environmental governance.

 

Indigenous knowledge the missing link in water management

Sabine Douxchamps

While numerous technical solutions have been developed and are available, adoption and adaptation of Agricultural Water Management (AWM) strategies remains limited in the Volta Basin. As such, future research and development projects should concentrate on understanding the factors limiting adoption and enhancing system productivity while ensuring healthy ecosystem services for long term sustainability. This is the key recommendation from a just completed study that sought to understand the evolution of AWM in the Volta Basin.

The authors Douxchamps, S., Ayantunde, A. and Barron, J., recommend that a system-wide perspective will be best to improve water-crop-livestock interactions, to develop off-season cultivation options and market access, and to balance gender benefits.

Sabine Douxchamps and Augustine Ayantunde are based at the People Livestock and Environment Theme  of ILRI and are working in the Volta Region.

These recommendations are made in their recently published paper Evolution of Agricultural Water Management in Rainfed Crop-Livestock Systems of the Volta Basin; published by the Colombo based CGIAR Challenge Program for Water and Food (CPWF). In their research, Douxchamps et al sought to synthesize existing knowledge, interventions, lessons, and gaps in knowledge regarding AWM in the Volta Basin. The questions that their paper addressed include (i) who did what, how, where, with which results and why, (ii) what are the lessons learned for longer term development efforts and interventions and (iii) what are the knowledge gaps, with focus on the Volta Basin. Key resource informants were interviewed and more than 250 documents were consulted, from peer-reviewed research papers to grey literature and project documents, from 1969 up to now.

Learning from the failures of the past, researchers and development practitioners interrogated the participatory approach and gave increasing importance to indigenous knowledge. This emphasis on participatory approach led to improvement of indigenous technologies, development of new technologies tailored to smallholders’ needs in various agroecological zones of the basin, and studies on farmers’ perceptions, adoption drivers and local institutions. The concept of AWM then became more and more integrated and it evolved from “sustainable land management” to “land husbandry” which includes the socio-economic context. To address all these complex facets research-for-development projects became multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder oriented.

They observed the need for a landscape perspective, to understand ecological landscape processes and trade-offs between ecosystem services derived from AWM strategies and an institutional perspective to facilitate management of AWM structures and to raise awareness. They also noted the need for a long-term perspective, to foresee the best strategies for adaptation to climate change and manage risk in the variable environment of the Volta Basin. Finally, there is a need for an impact perspective, with a continued assessment of actual benefits and effectiveness of large-scale international research for development programs.

“Local capacities and agendas should be better accounted for when promoting AWM strategies or low-cost irrigation technologies. Participatory management of the water infrastructure should be carefully planned through integration of maintenance costs in project budget, capacity building of actors towards assumption of more responsibility, and ways to deal with turnovers within management committees. Farmers’ capacity building is definitely a key asset for enlightened risk management and constant adaptation to new variable conditions” the authors observe adding that the scope for improvement lies in the coordination, collaboration and communication among various institutions and organisms active in the AWM sector.

In response to demographic pressure, environmental degradation, priorities of development actors and needs of smallholders, AWM strategies along with related concepts have evolved with time. First linked to erosion control in the 1960, AWM strategies were promoted for cash crop production in large scale state projects relying on technology transfer as a means of dissemination.

Following the first wave of droughts of the 1970s and the related food shortages, the focus moved to staple crop production and promotion of soil and water conservation techniques through large scale projects. However, the approaches were too much top-down, with experts as exclusive actors, projects were too short with “silver bullet” solutions, there was a lack of consideration for farmers’ preferences and traditions. Hence, when the second wave of droughts struck the basin in the 1980s, the smallholders were not better prepared and once again they were severely affected by loss of yields and income.

The paper is published by the CGIAR Challenge Program for Water and Food (CPWF)

 

Holistic planning good for environmental management

Ecosystem based planning should be combined with watershed management in order to achieve sustainable use of land and the services or values the land provides. This is one of the recommendations from a yearlong study by Silvia Silvestri on the Ecosystem services trade-offs in Ewaso Ng’iro, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. She was making the presentation at a workshop in Nyeri, Kenya at the close of the project entitled Resource mapping, land use development and planning in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands, undertaken in partnership with the World Resources Institute. The project was managed by ILRI’s People Livestock and Environmentteam (PLE) on Reducing vulnerability of livestock-based livelihoods, ecosystem goods and services in pastoral and agro-pastoral Systems.

Silvestri said there is increased risk of land use changes mainly related to increase in population and emigration upstream in the watershed. This in turn creates the need to plan for biodiversity conservation and development which she said is multi-disciplinary, requiring different stakeholders and it is particularly important in drylands where negative effects of land use changes can be amplified by water scarcity.

“We may lose services and value as a consequence of unsustainable land use. These include benefits from livestock and wildlife lost for lack of conservation corridors while water supply and irrigated crops may be compromised by increase of water demand”, said Silvestri.

She advised the re-aggregation of data from administrative boundaries to sub-catchment levels and the combination of economic values and socio-economic and natural assets as well understanding clearly the implications of trade-offs between crop and livestock production and selected wealth indicators.

In her research, Silvestri sought to link ecosystem services, human well-being and policy questions. This would help to produce alternatives, based on data and scenario development and understand ecosystem management interventions and change in well-being.

Silvestri described the various trade-offs taking place across the study area. There are trade-offs between livestock assets and products. Here, the livestock asset is similar but livestock products are much lower in the lower watershed where distances are also greater to the market. The higher the travel time to the market, the lesser the options for selling products into national markets and the possibility of getting better prices from products if transportation and communication were better.

Then there are trade-offs between crops and livestock. Although the market value of agriculture and livestock mostly depend on climatic conditions, infrastructure, access to water and markets are important determinants. People downstream have much fewer choices other than livestock which means less livelihood diversification. There is increased competition between resources and there is need for prioritization of interventions. Finally, there are trade-offs between tourism, cropping and livestock where the land cover and use change led to loss of wildlife habitat and increased human-wildlife conflicts.

The workshop was hosted by the Center for Training and Integrated Research In ASAL, (CETRAD)who were partners in implementing the project. The workshop was attended by several stakeholders working in the Ewaso Ng’iro watershed.

 

ILRI pastoral research team wins Sustainable Science Award

ILRI/PLE scientist, Mohammed Said

A project of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) called ‘Reto-o-Reto’has won an award five years after it ended. ‘Reto-o-Reto’, in the language of the pastoral Maasai people of East Africa means ‘I help you, you help me’. The project was bestowed the 2012 Sustainability Science Award for a paper titled ‘Evolution of models to support community and policy action with science: Balancing pastoral livelihoods and wildlife conservation in savannas of East Africa’, published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious American science journal.

The Ecological Society of America gives a Sustainability Science Award each year to the authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in the preceding five years that makes the greatest contribution to the emerging science of ecosystem and regional sustainability through the integration of ecological and social sciences.

Authored by 17 researchers representing 9 institutions, the paper shared experimental work in boundary-spanning research to help balance action in poverty alleviation and wildlife conservation in four pastoral ecosystems in East Africa. These were the Tarangire-Simanjiro-Manyara pastoral ecosystem in northern Tanzania; the Amboseli-Longido pastoral ecosystem on the northern and western slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, which straddles Kenya and Tanzania; the Kitengela pastoral ecosystem just south of the Nairobi National Park; and the Mara Pastoral ecosystem in Kenya, which is one of the wettest pastoral areas in East Africa.

Some of the team members studied the evolution of these pastoral systems in East Africa over a 25-year period, learning along the way how to close gaps, integrate scientific knowledge and then move outside their disciplines to policymakers and communities.

Writing to the paper’s lead author, ecologist Robin Reid, who worked for ILRI during the time of the research, Eleanor Sterling, chair of the subcommittee for the awards, said that the committee members ‘were impressed with this highly collaborative paper and how it focuses not just on research but on the research process itself, providing valuable and detailed insights into how the process of ecological research can align itself better with end-goals including conservation and poverty alleviation.

‘We felt the creation of hybrid local-scientific knowledge and the partnership of technical experts with place-based knowledge holders who understand the particular contexts in which stewardship occurs are critical to sustainability goals and to emerging needs such as actionable climate change adaptation strategies. The multi-partner, multidisciplinary approach is laudable, not only because you all illustrate how important it is to tackle sustainability problems from multiple angles, but also because you show that these collaborations are possible and serve to inspire us all.’

One of the authors, ILRI scientist Mohammed Said, says: ‘it took a lot of effort to pull the team together but it is satisfying that each member continued to play a crucial role in ensuring the outcomes were realized long after the project came to an end. These include the development of conservancies in the Mara, passing of the Land use Master plan in Kitengela, contribution to review of a number of polices related to drylands and pastoralists in Kenya and Tanzania and the development of a new MSc and PhD program at the University of Nairobi to focus on the drylands. This award will further boost these efforts’.

This is the second award that this team has won for their work on cross-boundary research. The first was in 2006, when it won the CGIAR ‘Best Innovative Partnership’ award. In bestowing this award, ILRI’s mother organization, the CGIAR recognized ILRI’s collaboration with the Kitengela Ilparakuo Landowners Association (KILA). (The CGIAR is now known as Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers). The collaboration won a Judges’ Award with a cash prize of US$30,000, to use for further collaborative work. ILRI’s drylands team has been collaborating with the Maasai of Kitengela Plains, located next to Nairobi National Park, in Kenya, since 2002. They have devised means to ensure that people, livestock and wildlife can live in harmony and have lobbied government to reduce fencing to allow the annual migration of wildlife though the Kitengela Plains, thus helping to prevent conflicts between wildlife and people and their livestock. Other collaborators of the program are Kenya Wildlife Service, Friends of Nairobi National Park, The Wildlife Foundation and Kajiado County Council.

 

LAPSSET needs better realignment to Vision 2030

Discussion has begun on how best to improve the economic, social and environmental outcomes of the recently launched Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor to make it a success and support the delivery of Vision 2030.

A meeting of interested stakeholders convened to discuss the LAPSSET corridor: preliminary analysis of risks and opportunities noted that “ …ninety percent of the LAPSSET corridor goes through arid and semi-arid lands, which are important areas for livestock production, tourism, biodiversity conservation, and cultural heritage. However, the feasibility study doesn’t give the full impact of the LAPSSET corridor on livestock and wildlife mobility or on water and pasture competition despite the fact that these issues already trigger deadly clashes between various communities….”

Due to a focus on a single component of Vision 2030, the LAPSSET corridor is currently undermining other objectives of Vision 2030. For example, it lays emphasize in promoting tourism in Kenya therefore it requires the improvement of tourism infrastructure and demands the securing of migratory corridors., The LAPSSET corridor traverses wildlife corridors which Vision 2030 is striving to achieve. It should attempt to balance the infrastructural objectives and tourism growth while minimizing impact on biodiversity. Such a multi-faceted approach to increasing Kenya’s economic growth ideally starts with an informed debate on the economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities related to the LAPSSET.

The LAPSSET corridor is one of the flagship projects of Kenya’s Vision 2030 whose objectives are “to improve access and connectivity between Kenya, Southern Sudan and Ethiopia as well as to stimulate economic activity in the Northern and Eastern parts of Kenya”.

The new Constitution of Kenya provides the legal framework for ensuring informed and participatory decision-making around development infrastructure like the LAPSSET corridor. In addition, Kenya has the data and expertise to inform discussions about the LAPSSET with its regular economic survey conducted by Kenya Bureau of Statistics or the thirty (30) years of information on region gathered by the Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing (DRSRS).

So far, however, the lack of meaningful stakeholder engagement has already resulted in court actions and the feasibility study hasn’t demonstrated an understanding of the context in which the LAPSSET is taking place.

The corridor presents a unique opportunity for the Northern and Eastern parts of Kenya to lay the ground for sustainable development. It will rectify a lack of accessibility to local, regional and international markets and will bring much needed investment in these regions. To be successful in the long-term, however, a project of such magnitude requires relevant information to be made available and debated by the various stakeholders.

The meeting was attended by stakeholder organisations involved in promoting rangeland livelihoods and conservation, among others the Kenya Rangeland Coalition, the International Livestock Research Institute and the East African Wildlife Society. These organisations are looking forward to collaborating with others and the project developers to realize the potential of the LAPSSET corridor.

 

ILRI to host Horn of Africa development initiative

On behalf of the CGIAR, ILRI will host a technical consortium to support a new initiativesseeking to develop long-term resilience to drought in the arid and semi-arid zones of the Horn of Africa. This initiative has been recently launched by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and its member states.

The technical consortium brings together all CGIAR centres plus other research and non-governmental organization partners. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Investment Centre provides support on developing investment plans.  They will over a one and a half year period draw up a program of work that will support technical and investment support to IGAD and the national governments in the greater horn of Africa.

‘The objective of the interventions at both regional and national levels is to sustainably improve livelihoods and enhance resilience to external shocks within the pastoral communities in the drylands and stimulate economic transformation’, said Polly Ericksen ILRI’s representative in the discussions.

Dedicated teams will be established in each country and for the IGAD secretariat to ensure continuity and consistency in the investment design process. These teams will contribute to the preparation, pre-appraisal and appraisal processes to ensure technical quality of proposed investment programmes. The technical consortium will promote collective and harmonized approaches to the different country and regional investment programmes.

The research and technical centres will contribute to action-oriented research analyses and implementation plans for development interventions while the FAO Investment Centre will provide assistance in investment programming work. The work will also support the development of the IGAD Regional the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which is itself a program of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

The Horn of Africa is known for its harsh and often prolonged droughts that threaten the lives of millions including children, women and the livestock on which the people are dependent for their livelihoods. ILRI through the People, livestock and environment theme has invested heavily in drylands research especially through the team Reducing vulnerability of livestock-based livelihoods, ecosystem goods & services in pastoral and agropastoral Systems. 

 

ILRI-PLE hosts policymaker, practitioner and community user workshop

Environmental Permanent Secretary Mr Ali Mohammed

The Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Mineral Resources, Mr Ali Mohammed (EBS) will on Tuesday 14th February 2012 give the opening address at a policy workshop hosted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Mr Mohammed was recently elected as Vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES is a mechanism being set up to further strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services. It is expected to enhance the existing processes that aim at ensuring that decisions are made on the basis of the best available scientific information on conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

The main aim of the workshop is to engage stakeholders from grassroots users through to national and international policymakers/practitioners, entrepreneurs, and scientists working on issues related to the Biodiversity, Ecosystem services, Social sustainability and Tipping points in African Dry lands (BEST) project. It is managed in collaboration with The African Technology Policy Studies Network, the Institute of Zoology, London, University College London, UCL, Anthropology (East African dry lands societies, livelihoods and NRM institutions) will host a one-day Policymaker, Practitioner and Community User Workshop. BEST is run by the People Livestock and Environment (PLE) theme in ILRI.

BEST targets to provide awareness into the poverty and environment impacts of different policies on tenure and natural resources management, as is incorporated at household decisions. The outcomes are intended to be used by national and international policymakers at all levels who have responsibility for planning and budgeting, climate change adaptation programmes, and donor-funded interventions. The stakeholders comprise of national and international interest groups (including responsible investors). The envisioned beneficiaries are the local users who are mostly the residents in the dry lands; BEST has the intentions to improve their livelihoods and environments and also make them more resilient and sustainable.

The workshop will be held at ILRI, Nairobi on 14 February 2012. BEST researchers will present project aims and approach, preliminary work completed to date, and plans for subsequent work, soliciting feedback on all elements of the project during the workshop.

The BEST research collaboration brings together international partners, social and natural scientists; specialists in ecology, economics and anthropology, in geographic information systems (GIS) and in modelling. Others are communications and research management experts, to help create an integrated approach to addressing central issues in African dry lands ecosystem services and poverty alleviation.

Project partners include TAWIRI, ASARECA, ESRC-STEPS and many others contributing data and insights, sharing and enhancing the networking potential in both consultation/feedback and dissemination of findings.

 

Drylands development in Eastern Africa: The policy context and recommendations

Policies, legal and institutional frameworks are core pillars of any conservation, natural resource management as well as development work at all societal levels. They define the relationships between people and resources and guide the interactions that ensue from such relationships for sustainability, growth and harmonious coexistence. In appreciation of the role that policy and laws play in biodiversity conservation and drylands development in Eastern Africa, a review was carried out on the regional and national policy contexts, which have a bearing on biodiversity conservation, pastoralism and drylands development.

The survey covered Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and explored the economic value of the drylands. It was undertaken by ASARECA and its partner institutions – the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Egerton University, the International Union for the Conservation of  Nature (IUCN) and RECONCILE.

View a a summary of the project as published in the ASARECA-PAAP newsletter for December 2011.

The three DRAFT policy briefs published from the project are shared here:

Policy brief 1 ASARECA Regional

policy brief 2 Mara Case Study Brief

Policy brief 3 Tarangire Case Study

 

Wildlife ‘crash’ in the Mara region of Kenya, Africa

Populations of wildlife species in the world-renowned Masai Mara reserve in Kenya have crashed in the past three decades, according to research published in the Journal of Zoology.

Numbers of impala, warthog, giraffe, topi and Coke’s hartebeest have declined by over 70%, say scientists.

Even fewer survive beyond the reserve in the wider Mara, where buffalo and wild dogs have all but disappeared, while huge numbers of wildebeest no longer pass through the region on their epic migration.

However, numbers of cattle grazing in the reserve have increased by more than 1100% per cent, although it is illegal for them to so do.

This explosion in the numbers of domestic livestock grazing in the Mara region of south-west Kenya, including within the Masai Mara national reserve, is one of the principal reasons wildlife has disappeared, say the scientists who conducted the research.

Dr Joseph Ogutu, a senior statistician in the Bioinformatics unit of the University of Hohenheim, Germany conducted the study with colleagues there and at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.

more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/13573912