Identifying pastoralists’ innovations in northern Kenya

The 36-page manual Identifying local innovations in pastoral areas in Marsabit County, Kenya provides insight into the methods used and the experiences gained while identifying local innovations developed by Rendille, Gabra and Boran pastoralists. The publication targets a wide audience, ranging from field staff working with pastoral communities, project managers and decision makers to students and scholars of innovation generation and diffusion. It is intended as a source book for people interested in the topic of local innovation in pastoral areas, in the process of identifying and documenting local innovations and in the specific local innovations that were identified in Marsabit County. The authors want to promote the identification of local innovations as a bottom-up strategy to learn about and enhance development processes in pastoral areas. Many top-down interventions with external technologies have failed, because the context specificity of pastoral production systems was underestimated. The authors start from the standpoint that any introduced idea needs to fit into the local production processes, which are constrained by a combination of place-specific environmental, sociocultural and economic conditions. The manual was brought out by the German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture (DITSL) at the Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences of the University of Kassel and was funded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Posted on 4 July 2013 in Pastoral Research & Innovation, Pastoralism & Services, Pastoralist Livelihoods & Nutrition