By Jarso Mokku

Reflection and feedback from the “Rethinking Early Action for Pastoralist Communities’ Future Prosperity and Resilience—Emerging New Narratives and Priorities.”

The session explored ‘grounded’ narratives on drylands in the Horn of Africa, their importance, and opportunities to enhance the systems of dryland communities for the prosperity and resilience of future pastoralists through early action and targeted investment.

Pastoralism is a primary source of livelihood for many people. It serves as a crucial component of the rural economy, contributing to local trade and infrastructure development. Pastoralists significantly enhance food security in the region through their consumption practices, providing products for the broader market, including all the milk and meat they consume, and supporting dryland food security, which benefits the rest of the country.

Livestock is the main source of wealth for pastoralist communities. The IGAD region—Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda—is a livestock powerhouse. It is home to 43% of Africa’s cattle (160 million), 34% of its sheep and goats (308 million), and nearly half the world’s camels (19 million), totaling 488 million animals (FAO 2021). These resources, managed largely by pastoralists in arid lands, are fundamental to food security and economies, contributing up to 70% of agricultural GDP in some countries, while exports, primarily to the Middle East, generate vital income. Despite climate challenges, livestock remain central to livelihoods and nutrition in the region.

Furthermore, it plays a crucial role in the economies of these countries, serving as a primary income source, ensuring food security, and creating trade opportunities in broader regional and global markets. It provides all the milk and meat that pastoralists consume in the Horn of Africa. It also represents a significant productive sector and a key national and regional GDP component, enhancing agricultural output, employment, and investment.

However, attention and investments in pastoralism and dryland economies are often influenced by misconceptions and guided by incomplete, incorrect, and negative understandings of the’ complex and relational nature of pastoralism systems. The presentation and plenary conversations reminded us of the old narrative driving pastoralism, dryland economies, policy, and practice. The underlying ideas in these narratives persist, even though new research continues to discredit their basis in truth or reason, or their acceptance. Yesterday’s lack of grounded narratives has restricted pastoralists’ routes to prosperity. It has influenced today’s policy development and investment choices. Nevertheless, pastoralism has persisted and demonstrated resilience. It supports the lives and livelihoods of over 60 million individuals in the Horn of Africa.

These outdated narratives propagate ideas that pastoralist and dryland economies are violent and irrational accumulations, environmentally destructive, inherently vulnerable, low-potential, and unproductive, hopeless, not worthy of investment, anti-modernity and fostering instability. Recommending solutions must only come from external input. These ideas are primarily constructed to reinforce negative attitudes and stereotypes, stemming from a distorted understanding, a lack of grounded knowledge, and a failure to genuinely appreciate pastoralists’ capacity, resilience, and flexibility in managing uncertainty and variable climate conditions over time and space.

What are the priority actions for the future pathways to pastoralist prosperity and resilience?

Shifting of policy actions from project-based crisis responses to proactively supporting community systems and developing suitable institutions and investment actions. We should continue the path of “grounded” understanding and acting on new narratives that strengthen successful collaborations across research, policy making, policy practice, and future investment in dryland economies.

Finally, it should be unacceptable for pastoralists to lack water and pasture; yet, it is not okay for crop farmers to lack farm inputs, seeds, and fertilizer, Hassan Bashir said. “The culture and behavior that failures define and make rules for pastoralism and dryland economies must end.”

Jarso Mokku is the CEO of Drylands Learning and Capacity Building Initiative and Secretary to the Pastoralist Parliamentary Group Secretariat based in Nairobi, Kenya.