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Amy Quinton: I’m in northern Kenya and a local driver is taking me to a remote village on one of the worst dirt roads imaginable…pothole ridden and washed out in parts. 

It’s been a few hours since we left the hillside town of Maralal and we aren’t even close to our destination. Getting there means another half mile on foot. 

We pass by goats, sheep, cattle and a camel with a bell around its neck, until we arrive at a small fenced-in area called a boma. It’s made of dried wood and brush with a few small huts inside. Men and women of the Samburu tribe live here. Nonkunta Lekupanae sits under an acacia tree. She wears rings of colorful beads from her neck to her shoulders. I asked her to tell me about her life here. 

Nonkunta Lekupanae: I like it here. We are pastoralists. We can get green grass for our animals and forage for our goats and camels. It’s also bushy here so we can secure ourselves and our herd from cattle rustlers.

Amy Quinton: For centuries, Samburu people have lived the same way, semi-nomadic, traveling with their livestock herds to find green pastures. But climate change is threatening their way of life. Rainfall has become more erratic and droughts more prolonged. Rival tribes sometimes steal their livestock as resources become scarce.

Nonkunta Lekupanae: We usually experience drought. It’s why right now I have very few animals. I had a lot of animals in the past, but the drought killed them all, cows, goats and even donkeys. It has made us poor.

Amy Quinton: So poor, their children go hungry. Pastoralists like the Samburu are some of the most vulnerable people in the world to climate change. In this episode of Unfold, we’ll examine how climate change is punishing the world’s poor and how ÍêÃÀÌåÓý researchers are looking for solutions.

THEME: Climate models all agree that temperatures are going to increase. It’s going to be hotter. It’s going to be drier. Fires are going to burn more frequently. Maybe this is never going to be the way it was again. We need to come up with ways to literally pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. How are we going to work together to solve a challenge like climate change?

Amy Quinton: Coming to you from our closet studios as we shelter in place across the Sacramento region, this is Unfold, a ÍêÃÀÌåÓý podcast that breaks down complicated problems and discusses solutions. This week, we unfold the climate crisis in Kenya. I’m Amy Quinton.

Kat Kerlin: And I’m Kat Kerlin. The World Bank estimates that by 2030, climate change could force more than 100 million people into extreme poverty. 

Amy Quinton: Some of the world’s poorest people will also become climate migrants – forced to move due to crop failure, a shortage of water or rising sea levels. 

Kat Kerlin: Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the areas that will be hardest hit. The Samburu people we just heard from are on the frontlines. Vast stretches of northern Kenya are becoming hotter and drier. 

Amy Quinton: Kat, here’s what I discovered while I was there. Climate patterns, you know, used to be fairly predictable. During dry seasons, when pastoralists like the Samburu may lose animals, they were usually followed by wet seasons, when they can rebuild herds. 

But Michael Carter, one of our agricultural economists here at ÍêÃÀÌåÓý, says all of that is changing. 

Michael Carter: Right now, the seasons are just totally messed up. So in the Northern Kenya regions, we’re seeing much more severe climate swings including more frequent drought events as well as seasonally surprising rainfall patterns. So this makes it really hard for people to sort of know what to do. The sort of traditional way of managing a rainy/dry, rainy/dry kind of time periods, when those weather patterns get disrupted it’s not quite clear what you do. You don’t know what’s going to come next. So, like farmers all over the world or people that depend on the weather all over the world, the pastoralists, are sort of figuring out, how do we do this?

Amy Quinton: Michael knows a lot about risk. He says it’s a huge factor in what makes and keeps rural agricultural people in the developing world poor.

Kat Kerlin: And climate change is making their lives riskier. What was it like when you visited northern Kenya?

Amy Quinton: I went during the dry season, only it was raining, pouring in fact in some areas. And from what I understand it rained for weeks after I left. Imagine if it were to rain here in the Central Valley in July or August. That’s what it was like.

Kat Kerlin: And this is a region in Africa that’s been hit hard by drought too? 

Amy Quinton: Right, Northern Kenya actually the entire horn of Africa, including Ethiopia and Somalia, they’ve been hit by four severe droughts in the last two decades. 

Kat Kerlin: Michael said risk keeps people poor. This is an area that’s already poor. 

Amy Quinton: Northern Kenya is one of the poorest regions in the country.

Michael Carter: When we first started our work in there it was estimated at that time that something like 40 percent of the population was living on under 50 cents a day, which is about one-fourth the level of what’s considered being really poor in the global economy - that’s typically more like two dollars per person per day and these people, or a large fraction of the population was living on less than that.

Amy Quinton: I visited Samburu County where about 58 percent of people live on less than a dollar a day. When drought hits this region, it often leads to a food crisis. Last year about 3 million people in northern Kenya were food insecure, when they don’t know where their next meal is coming from or even if they’re going to have enough to eat. 

Michael Carter: Which means it’s hard for children to grow up well nourished. It’s hard for them, if they have an opportunity to go to school, it’s hard for them to learn. It’s hard for families to pay for their children to go to school. So, it’s sort of a recurring cycle of poor parents and poor children who repeat that.

Kat Kerlin: So Michael then, since he’s an economist, must be studying the best way to prevent this cycle of poverty under a changing climate. 

Amy Quinton: Right, and we’ll unfold his involvement in a bit. But first, we’re going to go back to Kenya, to learn why women and children are often the ones who end up suffering the most. And we’re going hear about the Boma Project, that’s a nonprofit that Michael is working with, that is trying to help. 

Nonkunta Lekupanae, the Samburu woman we met earlier, lives in one of the most arid parts of Northern Kenya. Right now, the grass is green from recent rains, but it’s short, the soil is sandy and it’s easy to see that it wouldn’t take many dry days for this to look more like a desert. 

Nonkunta Lekupanae: We have water now because the place is still green. But when it is dry, we have to go almost four kilometers to get water for our children and the animals. 

Amy Quinton: Drought is one of the reasons some pastoralists here own camels. They still produce milk when they’re thirsty. Nonkunta had a camel until a lion killed it. She says drought here changes everything. 

Nonkunta Lekupanae: The drought is hard here. It depresses us. The animals go to green pastures, but we struggle here at home.

Amy Quinton: Raising livestock is the Samburu’s main source of income. It’s too arid to grow crops.  But it’s a patriarchal culture. Only the men travel with the herds. Women are left behind in the village with little or no way to earn income or feed their children. Most like Nonkunta turn to menial labor or sell what little they have.

Nonkunta Lekupanae: We have to collect aloe vera plants or sell our goats. We have to go to the market with our donkey to get food. We do this every day so we can feed our children.

Amy Quinton: Nonkunta has seven children to feed. She says it costs a third of what she makes collecting and selling aloe vera to buy one package of maize flour. 

Amy Quinton: In a forest conservation area not quite as far north as where Nonkunta lives, Fatumo Latito has invited me inside her small hut, called an enkaji in the Samburu language. It’s made from a mixture of cow dung and mud, with poles made from tree branches. It’s pouring rain outside, which is unusual for this time of year, but she remembers the last drought well. 

Fatumo Latito: Everyone lost livestock. If your herd was big, then you lost maybe half of them. If you only had a little, then you lost everything. I had four cows and I lost them all.

Amy Quinton: Without cows or goats to milk, she couldn’t feed her 8 children. She fetched water and firewood for a little money, but everyone was struggling. 

Fatumo Letito:  I thought ‘I need to have a farm to support my family.’ So, we moved to a place where food would grow and I could farm. But it didn’t work out. My husband and other men convinced me to come back.

Amy Quinton: In Samburu culture, men make most of the decisions. It’s also common for men to have more than one wife. Income often isn’t distributed equally among them.  

That can leave Samburu women and children in a desperate situation, says Tom Lenaruti, a field coordinator for a non-profit non-governmental organization called the Boma Project. 

Tom Lenaruti: It’s a cultural aspect that looks down upon women seeing them as people who are not supposed to even own property, people who don’t make decisions for the families. As an organization, we’ve seen that there is a need for empowerment of women to support and build up family or household income levels.

Amy Quinton: The Boma Project offers women cash assistance, mentoring and training to set up a small business. The businesses are run by three women instead of one, to prevent a husband from taking control.  They’re small enterprises, either buying and selling livestock or setting up kiosks to sell sugar, tea or other items. Tom says it’s a huge undertaking.

Tom Lenaruti: Formerly these are people who are totally illiterate, people who are not educated. So they are not exposed, so they have no idea what’s happening. We train them first to understand what are businesses? Because they don’t even know. The only see men sometimes engaged in business.

Amy Quinton: Let’s just imagine this task for a moment. Samburu women have very little money or capital, no i.d., no bank account, no notion of what type of business to even run or how to save money and keep records. The Boma Project teaches all of this, down to even providing a safe box to save money.

And it has dramatically changed their lives.

On top of a lush green hillside, Nkaspan Lentipo sits with her business partners. 

For the past year and a half, her business group has been trading livestock. Her wealth, which is measured by how many animals she has, has expanded. 

Nkaspan Lentipo: Look at me. Look at my health. Our kids go to school. I can buy medicine for my kids, my husband and even the livestock if they are sick. I can buy clothes for myself, my kids and my husband. Now I have 20 goats and seven cows.

Amy Quinton: She says before the Boma Project helped her out, she struggled to feed her eight children. 

Nkaspan Lentipo: I couldn’t sleep. The younger kids were crying because they went to bed hungry. It would force me to go and beg food from another neighbor. Sometimes I’d be given food, sometimes I wouldn’t. 

Amy Quinton: It’s still not easy. The market to sell their animals is three to four hours on foot. And it’s unclear what would happen if another bad drought were to hit. Nkaspan is confident she and her business partners will manage.

Nkaspan Lentipo: First, we know it’s coming. Since there are three of us, we are going to split our duties. Some of us will stay and sell the healthier animals and save the money. The rest will go to green pastures.

Amy Quinton: Nkaspan says each of them has 9,000 shillings, which is enough money to last them 8 months. 

Kat Kerlin: Amy, it’s clear from what we’ve heard that women and children in these pastoral communities are really living on the edge. But the Boma Project sounds really successful, at least from the woman you talked with. 

Amy Quinton: I spoke to several who told me that it’s changed their lives, that they’ve saved and they’ve been able to send their kids to school, which is a really big deal. And Michael Carter says at least one study has pointed to it raising living standards by 20 to 30 percent.  But the question remains: is it enough? 

Michael Carter: So that’s remarkable given that these people live with these cycles of good years and bad years and drought years, how persistent are these kinds of effects? And so It was within this context that we said, well, we already know the traditional lifestyle, economic activity of families can get wiped out by droughts, what about the assets and the businesses that these women build?

Kat Kerlin: Is he suggesting that these women could lose their business and everything they’ve been saving, even those who have plans to weather the next drought?

Amy Quinton: We still really don’t know what will happen in a prolonged drought, the kind that can come with a changing climate. There was a drought eight years ago and some of the women in the Boma program lost their businesses. And this is where Michael’s research comes into the picture. He’s looking at long-term strategies to help