Assessment of Options for Meeting Food Security in Mandera County Kenya

Purpose; This study analyses factors affecting access to food for pastoralists living in Mandera County, Kenya. The County is an arid region on the North East most part of Kenya that borders Ethiopia and Somalia to the North and East respectively and face serious challenges of access to food. The community predominantly practice pastoral nomadism. Pastoralism in the Horn region presents unique challenges with accessing food and this calls for special approaches to ensure regular and sustainable access to food.Materials and Methods; The study employed a combination of methods that included secondary data collection from the government and other institutions in the region, literature review, use of household questionnaire, key informant interviews, focus group discussions as well as field observations. Results and Discussions; Food sources in Mandera were found to be based on pastoral nomadism way of life, a practice graviously affected by weather factors and therefore fragile and unreliable. Others factors affecting access to food were identified as high poverty levels, income sources, population growth, insecurity, relief food, poor infrastructure and telecommunication, limited access to credit and extension, crop production factors, food consumption preferences and low levels of education,  The community has adopted a number of coping mechanisms. Some of these mechanisms target short term shocks such as prolonged droughts but have adverse effects on access to food in the long term. Conclusions; Factors affecting food security should be managed properly and in a sustainable way to ensure access to food is predictable and reliable. Access to food should address those fundamental factors and this should be a priority for Mandela County. This should be done through establishing strong and long term strategies for enhancing access to food. Keywords: Food security, pastoral-nomadism, food production, aridit

Impact of ownership of water resources and associated facilities to its access and management in the asal Kitui County, Kenya

In Kenya, where 80% of the land is arid and semi-arid, access to water is an everyday challenge for majority of the people. Methods used to improve access to water in Kenya results to different, and sometimes unexpected outcomes. The water resources assessed have come about through interventions by various agents, majority donor funded. These agents use various models resulting to different outcomes. We assessed technologies used to improve access to water in the Asals of Kitui County, Kenya. The technologies were classified into four; individual, private, community and government owned. Those assessed were tanks, boreholes and hand dug wells, sand dams and pipelines for individual, private, community and government owned respectively. Private and individual resources outperformed others in terms of management with donor aided community owned being the least sustainable. Government owned water facilities reached relatively more people and although unreliable were the most trusted source to those covered by the infrastructure. Individual owned water resources offered water in small quantities, the main benefit being owners were able to manage with ease through rationing to stretch availability for a long time. Donor funded community owned resources suffered vague ownership models making their management and maintenance impossible. Privately owned resources offered the best solution as water was sold and the resulting money become income for the owners as well as providing resources for maintenance. The resulting income offered incentives for further investment which further improved access. The tragedy with privately owned water resources was that the poor paid too much for water while the rich continued to accumulate massive wealth. To ensure adequate access to water especially in remote places, privately owned and operated systems should be encouraged and supported but with government sponsored regulations to ensure the poor are not exploited.Water Resource