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

would be more sustainable and constructive if they were more sensitive to
the origins, dynamics, and differential experience of local people, and paid
more attention to the challenges of minimizing risks and coping with
crises. Intervention projects should therefore build on local practices by
identifying what Turkana people have rather than what they don’t have,
and strengthen local inventive solutions, rather than substitute for, or
undermine them.
The prominence of my interest in undertaking this research originates with
three experiences: First, while working in rural Turkana District as a
government officer in 1999, the annual drought, enormous suffering, and
ensuing famine made me feel that something needed to be done to change
things for the better, to enhance the Turkana people’s resilience to
drought, and see the end of media coverage that documented their sorrow
and misery. I began to realize that the Turkana’s own capacity to recover
from drought depends on their ability to draw on their network of social
relations for help, and that the more people with whom one has close
relations, the better. Their social networking acts as an informal safety
net 15 which promotes social stability. The safety net function of networks
is crucial to understanding the Turkana’s ability to cope with economic or
physical shocks to their livelihood.
Secondly, Soja, (1968), in his book ‘The Geography of Modernization in
Kenya’, taught me that during the pre-colonial past, many nomadic
communities such as the Turkana were not vulnerable to calamities
(crises) as they were wealthy, well-fed and politically powerful. Turkana
herders constantly switched back and forth between a range of livelihood
activities depending on whether conditions were good or bad. They
mobilized a set of livelihood strategies 16 which they resorted to in times of
15 My study adopts Devereux (2001) definition of safety net as non-market transfers of
goods and services between households.
16 See Corbett (1988) for a description of the sequential phases that characterise coping
behaviour following a disaster such as drought.
16