Fighting climate change: Kajiado residents convert seasonal river into a resilience lifeline

The first day of October 2022 in Ng’atatoek, Kajiado County, was dry and hot. You could turn a whole three-sixty-degrees and barely catch a glimpse of green: it was all hues of brown.

It was the height of the 2022 drought. By then, according to Gideon Parsanga, the sub-chief of the location, herders within his area of jurisdiction had lost over 7,000 animals to the drought between June and October.

“Without sufficient food, the animals not only lack energy but their immunity also takes a beating and they become vulnerable to diseases. The result is death,” Parsanga told this reporter.

Some 11 kilometres from the Kajiado-Namanga highway, we found Nkoki Manasseh, a herdsman, emerging from a thicket of dry twigs; behind him a stench of rotting animals.

Manasseh was from dumping a carcass, a casualty of the drought. With an expressionless face that had become numb to the devastation, Manasseh motioned for us to follow him to the kraal.

Right there, above ash dry cow dung, we found a heifer unable to stand on its own and struggling to stay alive.

“This is my daily reality now,” he said. “It won’t make it past today.”

Before the drought, Manasseh was caring for over 100 cows. That October, the herd had dwindled to just over 20, and the drought was far from done.

Before we left, he took us back to the thicket where he had been taking carcasses. The stench was unbearable. Millions of maggots oozed from every orifice of the dead animals.

“We have suffered losses too painful to talk about,” he said in his parting shot.

That day at 3pm on the highway in Ilbisil, we found a trucker offloading hay for sale. A bale weighing approximately 15 kilogrammes was going for Sh300.

“That is just too expensive for herders, especially at a time they really have no way of making money,” Jacob Solitei, a pastoralist who had lost more than 50 cows to the drought, told this reporter.

That day, Solitei had driven two of his cows, “the ones that look like they could survive”, in his Toyota Probox and had been waiting at the roadside for the hay transporters.

Even though the hay was for sale and “expensive”, pastoralists scrambled for it. The chaos mirrored the despair of the unfolding and unforgiving drought.

“We have had no rain for two years. It has been so dry,” Solitei said.

By February 2023, the rains had come. The drought dissipated.

Fast forward to November 2025: The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) classified nine counties, Kajiado among them, under ‘Alert’ drought phase.

In January 2026, NDMA offered an update: Drought conditions continued to worsen across most Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) counties. Some counties, like Marsabit and Mandera, are in the ‘Alarm’ phase. Kajiado is in the ‘Normal’ phase.

Indeed, two weeks ago, we made a return journey to Kajiado and the situation was nothing compared to three-and-a-half years ago.

The Kajiado sun still blares as hot as it does on a regular day. Ambient temperatures squeezed the sweat off the reporter’s forehead. But there were no dying livestock.

In fact, the livestock that survived 2022 seem to have done a commendable job repopulating the landscape. Spot checks in Ilbisil, Ng’atatoek, Namanga and Olgulului show the cattle beefy and the small ruminants full of vitality.

In many wards around Kajiado, locals are devising and implementing rudimentary solutions for when drought swings back “like it always does,” according to Joseph Sayialel from Olgulului, a former counsellor and an owner of hundreds of livestock.

“I was born in 1964. I was told that there was a terrible drought that year. In 1974, at the age of 10, I witnessed my first severe drought. Then in 1984 – I was a moran – there was another severe drought. So did 1994. Severe drought, as far as I can remember, is cyclical: it used to come every 10 or so years,” he says, adding:

“But after 1994, the frequency started coming down. Now, every five or so years, we get a severe drought. The last one was in 2022. Personally, I lost more than 2,000 livestock. That was after traversing from here to Narok, to Nakuru, to Longonot, to Kitui and back here  in search of pasture.”

In Ilbisil, residents have voted for and implemented the digging of a community borehole and equipping it with a solarised pump. In Ildamat ward, a public primary school is producing tonnes of food on an irrigated one acre.

In Olgulului, residents elected more radical solutions: redirecting storm water that cascades down River Olgulului every rainy season, headed to Tanzanian pasturelands.

To do so, they asked for three dykes and one sand dam at specific locations along the river.

“This river carries millions of litres of water to Tanzania. Drought still comes and we watch our animals die. The river does not help us, yet it snakes through our landscape and takes away the fertility of our soils, digging ugly gullies that are a hazard for our animals and us on its way to Tanzania,” says Leah Tonkei, a resident.

The dykes and the sand dam were funded through Financing Locally Led Climate Action (FLLoCA), a government programme through Climate Finance and Green Economy Unit at the National Treasury and Economic Planning ministry.

“What we have done is work with the local people to figure out how best to help the community adapt to the challenges of global warming. Every ward, except those in cities and big towns, has an FLLoCA committee made up of locals. Their job is to collect views from the community and send a unified proposal to us at the county level. They have the indigenous knowledge; they know solutions that would work for them. We only fund that which they recommend,” says Peter Odhengo, FLLoCA programme coordinator.

In 2021, as the weather showed drought signs, Olgulului residents contributed to a kitty, money that totalled just over Sh100,000, to put up a sand dam on the river.

“We bought sacks, filled them with sand, and piled them up to act like a barrier. That is all the money we raised could do. When it rained, the barrier was swept away. We have needed this help for a long time,” Kenyatta Oloitiptip, an elder from the area, recalls.

Tonkei is the chairperson of the Entonet Lengisim Ward FLLoCA Committee, the home of River Olgulului.

“This is the closest we have come to solving our water and pasture problems,” she says. “Before today, we used to go as far as Kitengela to buy hay during dry seasons.”

Speaking atop one of the dykes, Oloitiptip explained that the three dykes achieve three positives for residents of Olgulului.

“One, it slows down the intensity of storm water as it comes down from the hills of Ol-Donyo-Orok in Matapato, just before Namanga town. Usually, it is raging and capable of sweeping away livestock and human beings. Two, the dykes are holding the topsoil from erosion. The result is backfilling of the soil and a massive improvement in the fertility of the surrounding land. And lastly, the dykes redirect a lot of the stormwater to the plains of Olgulului and the larger Amboseli ecosystem. This supports grass and vegetation growth for our livestock and wildlife, thereby increasing our resilience during prolonged drought,” he says.

Indeed, past the dyke into the grassland, vegetation is more lush.

Kennedy Nailita is the chairman of Olgulului’s Grazing Committee.

“In my committee, we plan and map out grazing to allow regeneration and sustainability. The grass and vegetation you can see here today is because of these dykes. This is a game changer for us because livestock are our lifeline,” Nailita says.

According to James Kaika, the sub-chief of Olgulului, livestock is the centre of gravity among the Maasai.

“Our lives revolve around livestock. It is the backbones to our lifestyle. We use cattle to pay bride price. We slaughter livestock during ceremonies such as circumcision. We get meat and milk from livestock. And now, with modernity, we sell livestock to earn a living; which allows us to pay school fees for our children and to purchase household and domestic goods,” he says.

Therefore, he says, there is nothing more disruptive to the Maasai way of life than droughts.

Further downstream, just after the sand dam, we find a section of the river, the size of a football field, with water. We find a few villagers watering their animals and some fetching for domestic use. Wild geese float out in the distance.

“This is a miracle. The last time it rained was in December 2025. By now there would be no water here. But here we are. Those dykes and the sand dam have improved water retention. Which means, as a community, we have become more resilient to drought. Previously, at a time like now, I would be walking for two or three hours to fetch water,” Jane Kilana, a resident, says.