Drought Contingency Planning with Pastoral Communities - celep

Pastoral economy also has its own benchmark where livestock prices are able to fetch the
minimum prices, hence depicting undermined pastoralist purchasing power. In northern
Kenya where drought early warning system has been operationalised, cereal-meat price
ratio has been used to monitor pastoralist’s purchasing power. High cereal-meat price ratio
means a pastoralist household would have to sell high number of small stock in exchange of
a kilogram of cereal. These are some of indicators used to assess certain levels of thresholds.
2.7 Response Strategies for the Likely Case Scenario
After defining the scenarios using the risk analysis result, the next step is to identify
response strategies. A response strategy in this sense refers to what we want to achieve
in our response intervention (objective of the response) and how we want to achieve this
objective. The response strategy in a contingency plan serves this purpose and also acts as
a bridge between the scenario and the plan that follows. The PDRA and other data sources
complement each other to provide in‐depth situational analysis and guide in formulation
of response objectives. It ensures a clear focus of interventions directed at saving human
lives and livelihoods. The early warning system should be reliable and provide timely and
efficient information to trigger response. The early warning thresholds guide in triggering
timely response thus minimizing the responding at the point of destitution. Communities
have their traditional early warning systems as well as the conventional early warning
systems that provide information.
There are currently several studies underway that identify at which benchmark EWS
shall activate the contingency plans. The result of this is critical for the effectiveness of
drought management. In established drought early warning system in Kenya for example,
contingency plans are activated in between the alert/alarm stage of the drought cycle
where all monitored indicators reflect worsening trends. At the community level, pastoral
communities have their early warning indicators with respective thresholds guiding the
contingent coping mechanisms. For example, utilization of certain water sources like the
strategic dry season boreholes are only utilized when the water distances have exceeded
10km plus watering hours of livestock going beyond eight hours. At this point, the rangelands
user association in conjunction with water user associations institute measures to utilize
dry season grazing areas and strategic boreholes with a clear management function.
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