ISIOLO, Kenya — A hot wind sweeps across the rocky brush of Camp Simpirre in northern Kenya’s Isiolo county. Baboons cross the pathway to the dinner hall; vervet monkeys patter across the tin roof that shades an assembled group of 47 researchers and academics from the beating midday sun. The night before, some were jolted awake by the sound of a lion’s roar, uncomfortably close to where they were sleeping.
Camp Simpirre, just next to the town of Gotu, is an unusual setting for an academic conference, but the Drylands Summer School isn’t a typical conference. Isiolo county, a sparsely populated, arid acacia-studded range where most people make their living herding livestock, is right where researchers who study pastoralism want to be.
Hussein Tadicha Wario, executive director at the Center for Research and Development in Drylands, a pastoralist research institute based in the area that planned and convened the conference, said the setting is part of the lesson plan. High-level conversations about pastoralism, a lifestyle that still dominates large swaths of East Africa, are often held in Nairobi and other big cities. Decisions made there can be out of touch and impossible to carry out.
“Our [approach] is how can we bring the conversation down to the ground,” he said.
That ground is dry, sandy and hot. It might not look it on first glance, but northern Kenya’s ecology is rich and intricately balanced. Savanna elephants bathe in nearby riverbeds, bat-eared foxes dart under thorny shrubs, and white-browed sparrow weavers chirp from hanging nests that dangle from the branches of acacia trees. Salvadora persica, the “toothbrush tree,” provides chewing sticks with dental properties as effective as toothpaste.
It’s also one of the home ranges of Kenya’s pastoral communities, whose lives have been woven into — and shaped — the ecosystem here for thousands of years. Groups like the Rendille, Samburu, Borana, Turkana and Gabra have cultures that revolve around livestock, which they herd across vast distances in search of grasses and shrubs.
That movement is a vital cog in the region’s ecology; some plant species depend on foraging animals to reproduce, and the cycle of grazing replenishes grasses, storing carbon in the soil. But this picture of pastoralists, as skillfully negotiating their landscape, hasn’t always been the norm.
Western ecologists, whose work was often based on research conducted in North American settings, tended to frame pastoralists as a burden on the environment. Seeing their grazing systems as unmanaged, they theorized that rangelands would eventually be overburdened and degraded — the “tragedy of the commons” — failing to see how traditional grazing systems kept them healthy.
The students here want to tell a different and, they say, more accurate story about pastoralists and their history in landscapes like this. Most are from East Africa, and a number were themselves raised in nearby communities of herders.
“We want to plant a seed in young, early-career researchers so they’re able to get things right from early on,” Wario said.
For a week, they sat in the sweltering heat of Isiolo’s dry season, listening to presentations from visiting scholars like Gufu Oba and Ian Scoones. They learned how to turn their research into policy recommendations, sharing encouragements, dinner, and a few laughs under starlit nights.
“In my community, I’m the only girl who has finished high school and university,” said Halima Alinoor. “And I’m also the first one doing a master’s. For me it has felt like a trailblazing situation from the place I’m coming from. Seeing so many people from the same location doing their Ph.D. and master’s is something that’s giving me hope.”
The conference was sponsored by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. But it almost had to slash its participant list after a secondary donor, USAID, was unceremoniously shut down by the U.S. government in late January. The Jameel Observatory, part of the International Livestock Research Institute, stepped in to plug in the gap.
On the conference’s fourth day, the young academics piled into vans to visit the small town of Barambate and practice their fieldwork. Darmi Jattani, a master’s student from nearby Marsabit county, taught some of her colleagues a word in the local language, Borana.
“Rakoo. It means like when they’re between a rock and a hard place, like during a drought. But we’re using it in terms of their every day,” she said.
Pastoralists in northern Kenya and across the world are very much in rakoo these days. Their way of life requires enough space to move around, and governments often have other ideas for the land they graze their herds on. Infrastructure development, natural resource extraction, and land acquisitions are putting pressure on their cultures as well as the ecology of the rangelands they inhabit.
Climate change isn’t helping. Between 2020 and 2023, East Africa suffered one of the worst droughts in its recent history, decimating livestock populations in places like Isiolo and throwing the region into upheaval.
But researchers here said it’s a mistake to think climate change is going to eradicate pastoralism. Its adaptability to environmental variance could even make it more resilient than farming. Already, pastoralists in northern Kenya have increasingly begun to switch from cattle to camels, which can go longer without water and still produce nutritious milk.
Mohammed Abdi, a student from eastern Ethiopia who’s studying for a Ph.D. in drylands research management at the University of Nairobi, said pastoralists have had to adapt to environmental change throughout history. Their centuries-old experience will be an asset if there are difficult times ahead, he said.
“Pastoralism is a product of climate change, it always changes with the climate. Some people say that because this way of life is vulnerable, it will collapse, but that’s the old narrative,” Abdi said.
Wario said he wants to arm the young researchers with tools they can use to support their communities by pushing for better policy and representation for pastoralists in the halls of power.
“I actually see some of the young ones from the north being able to take over from us in terms managing [government and research] institutions in the future, and being able to influence thinking,” he said. “Others could join government.”
Near the end of a long week, under the glittering stars of a clear night, Dahabo Damballa, a researcher from Marsabit who works with the Center for Research and Development in Drylands, read a poem she’d written.
“She’s tougher than her world/ Resilient is the word/ Resilient is the girl from the north.”
This article by Ashoka Mukpo was first published by Mongabay.com on 6 March 2025. Lead Image: A herd of camels in Isiolo county, Kenya. Image by Ashoka Mukpo/Mongabay.
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