PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

Section Two provides an overview of the various socio-economic and
political assets which overtime has influenced the development of different
kinds of livelihood strategies in the Turkana District. 66 This follows Moser’s
(1998) argument that local people’s vulnerability is closely related to asset
ownership: the more assets people have, the less vulnerable they are and
the greater the erosion of assets the greater the level of vulnerability. Watts
(1983), Adams (1992) and Deveurex (1993) also point out that assets
owned and productive diversity is strongly related with resilience and
successful adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this section, two major
issues are explored in relation to assets: access to assets as the key issue
in the conceptualization of the livelihoods, and Turkana people’s own
capability of transforming the assets to improve their existing livelihood
strategies. Here, livelihood is considered as holistic, including economic,
and material and non-material aspects of well-being. Bebbington (1999)
affirms as follows:
A person’s assets, such as land [cattle], are not merely
means with which he or she makes a living; they are
assets that give them the capability to be and to act.
Assets should not be understood only as things that
allow survival, adaptation and poverty alleviation; they
are also the basis of agents’ power to act and to
reproduce, challenge or change the rules that govern
the control, use and transformation of resources (1999:
3).
The information in which this chapter is built comes from an extensive
review of several Turkana studies, as well as from discussions with key
informants and household heads during my field study period.
66 As discussed in Chapter 2, it is the disorganization of the assets during crises that
facilitate the search for various survival strategies by the Turkana people.
92