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A woman stands in a well dug by the Daasanach community, illustrating how far community members must dig to access water for their daily needs during the drought
Photo Credit: © Asher Rosinger
Scientific Frontline: Extended "At a Glance" Summary: Historic Kenyan Drought Impacts
The Core Concept: A severe drought in northern Kenya fundamentally altered the livelihoods, nutrition, and cultural norms of the Daasanach, a pastoralist community, shifting them away from traditional livestock herding.
Key Distinction/Mechanism: Unlike typical, brief dry periods, this prolonged extreme climate event induced long-term shifts in subsistence strategies (e.g., transitioning from herding to fishing), altered settlement patterns, and exacerbated gender disparities in food and water insecurity.
Origin/History: The study covered the period before, during, and after the historic Greater Horn of Africa drought, which occurred from late 2020 to early 2023.
Major Frameworks/Components:
- Nutritional Decline: Livestock losses reduced access to milk and meat, leading to weight loss in adults and children, and stunted growth in children that persisted even after the drought ended.
- Cultural Shift: Fishing, previously stigmatized as a livelihood for the impoverished, became a widely adopted and accepted adaptation strategy for food and income.
- Settlement Changes: Decreased mobility led to families settling closer to towns to access food assistance, schools, and other resources.
- Gender Disparity: Women disproportionately experienced food and water insecurity, along with greater losses in body fat, compared to men.
Branch of Science: Anthropology, Biobehavioral Health, Environmental Science.
Future Application: The findings highlight the necessity of incorporating community-level lived experiences of water insecurity into drought monitoring systems to optimize the targeting of assistance by governments and humanitarian organizations.
Why It Matters: The research demonstrates that extreme climate events not only inflict immediate physical and nutritional harm but can also permanently reshape cultural processes, societal norms, and the fundamental structures of daily life in vulnerable communities.
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| Asher Rosinger measuring the subscapular skinfold thickness as a measure of nutritional status on a Daasanach adult man during the height of the drought in July 2022. Photo Credit: © Asher Rosinger |
During a historic drought in northern Kenya, a pastoralist community turned to a food source it had long viewed as a fallback for people without livestock: fishing.
As herds dwindled and families struggled to obtain food, fishing on nearby Lake Turkana became increasingly common among the Daasanach. By the end of the drought, a livelihood once associated with poverty and social stigma had become an important source of food and income.
The shift is among the key findings of a new collaborative study—led by Penn State researchers and published in the journal Global Environmental Change—showing that prolonged drought can alter not only physical health and food access, but also the cultural norms, livelihoods, and settlement patterns that shape daily life.
The researchers began the study before the drought, so they were able to document the changes as they unfolded and follow the Daasanach for a year after rains returned. The team found that the effects of an extreme climate event can persist in many ways, even after environmental conditions improve.
“When we started this project, we were interested in understanding long-term water and food security among a population living in a hot, dry environment that is highly susceptible to droughts,” said Asher Rosinger, associate professor of biobehavioral health and anthropology at Penn State, who was lead author and principal investigator on the study. “We didn’t know we were about to witness one of the most severe droughts in recent history, which allowed us to see how people adapted as conditions changed.”
Rosinger and collaborators included 515 adults and 384 children from the Daasanach community from 2019 through 2024. The study spanned the period before the historic Greater Horn of Africa drought, which lasted from late 2020 to early 2023, and included a full year after conditions improved.
According to the researchers, the drought affected nearly every aspect of life they measured, including nutrition, physical health, food and water security, livelihoods, and mobility.
Livestock losses sharply reduced access to milk and meat, which also meant people moved less with their herds and stayed closer to town. Adults and children lost weight, and children experienced reduced growth in height. While reported food and water insecurity improved after the drought ended, many nutritional effects persisted through 2024.
“The physical consequences of the drought lasted well beyond the return of the rains,” Rosinger said. “Children’s growth did not fully recover during the period we studied, highlighting that these events can have long-term health consequences.”
However, the study found that children who consumed more milk during the drought had better nutritional outcomes.
Fishing offered a form of adaptation. Historically, the Daasanach stigmatized fishing because livestock and meat were highly valued. People without livestock sometimes turned to fishing for food and were viewed as poor.
During the drought, more families began fishing to supplement their diets and earn income to purchase other foods. As fishing became more common, its stigma diminished.
“The fact that the Daasanach widely moved more toward fishing and that the stigma went away shows how large shocks like extreme drought can affect cultural processes, including behaviors and norms that govern how people act and how they perceive each other,” Rosinger said.
The drought’s effects were not shared equally. Women experienced greater hardship than men, in part because they are primarily responsible for collecting water and preparing food, and they often eat after other family members. Women reported higher food and water insecurity and experienced greater losses in body fat, with the largest differences occurring at the height of the drought.
The drought also changed where people lived. As pastoralism became more difficult, families became less mobile and increasingly settled near towns, where food assistance, schools, and other resources were available.
Rosinger said the findings illustrate how drought can destabilize communities by depleting food, water, and the assets people use to manage shortages. As those resources decline, people may become more dependent on outside assistance or move in search of food, water, and work.
The findings may be relevant beyond the Daasanach, according to Rosinger. Other drought-prone communities that depend heavily on environmental resources may similarly change livelihoods, move closer to services, or become more reliant on outside assistance. The specific responses, however, depend on local cultures, economies, and environments.
The study also suggests that drought monitoring systems could be strengthened by measuring how people experience shortages, rather than relying solely on environmental indicators such as rainfall and livestock numbers, Rosinger explained.
“People’s lived experiences of water insecurity provide important information about how drought affects health and well-being,” Rosinger said, noting that rainfall data can identify drought conditions, but they cannot show how often people go without water, go to bed thirsty, or skip bathing because water is unavailable. “Combining those experiences with environmental and nutritional data can help governments and humanitarian organizations better target assistance.”
Rosinger said the study demonstrates the value of long-term research as extreme weather events become more frequent and severe.
“Being able to see the process from before to after the drought was critical,” he said. “It allowed us to see how the landscape and water sources transformed, and how people were affected and, importantly, responded to it.”
The researchers are continuing to collect data from the Daasanach community to better understand how environmental changes, including changes in drinking water salinity, affect health.
Funding: The research was supported by Penn State, the US National Science Foundation under award numbers 1924322 and 1852406, as well as the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under award number P2CHD041025, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences under award number R01ES035402.
Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funders.
Published in journal: Global Environmental Change
Authors: Asher Y. Rosinger, Matthew Douglass, Amanda McGrosky, Kedir Teji Roba, Benjamin Davies, Natalie Meriwether, Alfredo J. Rojas Jr., Leslie Ford, Hannah Jacobson, Faith Wambua, Elena Hinz, Srishti Sadhir, Anna Tavormina, Lilian Baker, Alison Sherwood, Suha Arshad, Nicole Bobbie, Carey Musumeci, Kiera Papa, Zoë Farrar, and Herman Pontzer
Source/Credit: Pennsylvania State University
Edited by: Scientific Frontline
Reference Number: anth082526_01
