The Forgotten Kenyan: What Life Looks Like In Arid And Semi-Arid Counties
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Your phone probably has 47% battery right now, and you're reading this in a space with electricity. That's already more infrastructure certainty than a Turkana pastoralist will experience this month.
It's the uncomplicated inequity that defines Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs)—not dramatic suffering you see in documentaries, but the grinding invisibility of being systematically underinvested in by your own government. When the 2022 drought killed 7 million livestock across counties like Marsabit, Samburu, and West Pokot, did your newspaper's homepage carry it for a full week? Did Parliament hold an emergency session? The answer is written in the absence itself.
Here's what the textbooks don't tell you: 23% of Kenya's land mass and roughly 10 million people live in these counties, yet they capture disproportionately tiny slices of the national budget pie. A child born in Nairobi's Westlands has statistically better chances of reaching secondary school than a child born in Turkana—not because of capability, but because one was born on the winning side of resource allocation. One gets tarmacked roads. One gets a healthcare worker within walking distance. One's droughts are called "climate challenges" in parliament speeches. The other's are called his destiny.
The pattern repeats across sectors with brutal consistency. When we debate "Kenya's education crisis," we're usually discussing urban underperformance. But in Samburu County, the secondary school completion rate hovers around 15%. Fifteen. That statistic should terrify everyone involved in education policy, yet it barely registers in Nairobi's think tank circles. These aren't areas struggling with *quality* of education—many lack education infrastructure entirely. A girl in Laikipia is twice as likely to drop out before Form One than her counterpart 200 kilometers south in Central Kenya.
Healthcare tells the same story. A pregnant woman in Isiolo County faces odds that would trigger national outrage if they applied to any other demographic. Maternal mortality rates in ASALs remain stubbornly among Africa's highest. Why? Not mystery, but mathematics: fewer hospitals, fewer doctors, fewer ambulances. It's not complicated; it's just underfunded.
What makes this politically calculated is how it persists across administrations. Devolution was supposed to fix this—put resources closer to communities, let counties control their destiny. Yet the fiscal transfer system still favors already-developed counties with better capacity to utilize funds. It's like telling a runner with a broken leg to race fairly because they're now on the same track. The ASAL counties struggle not just with drought, but with institutional capacity built on decades of neglect.
But here's where the narrative usually deflates into despair, and that's precisely the wrong move.
ASALs aren't "problem areas." They're underutilized assets. Turkana's oil reserves could have transformed regional prosperity—instead, they became a referendum on whether the national government even wanted these counties to develop. Pastoralist communities possess sophisticated knowledge systems about land management that universities are just beginning to study seriously. The livestock economy these regions manage represents billions in national output, yet policy treats it like a relic.
What needs to happen isn't radical. It requires: deliberate, multi-year capital investment in ASAL health and education infrastructure; technology-enabled solutions for distance (telemedicine, digital learning aren't luxuries—they're solutions); serious pastoral economy support instead of treating pastoralism as a problem to solve; and political honesty that this is about justice, not charity.
The Kenyan government recently unveiled fancy infrastructure in Nairobi's CBD while Garissa County counted crises. That's not development strategy; it's a choice.
The Forgotten Kenyan isn't forgotten because of geography. He's forgotten because his vote counts the same as yours, but his resources don't. That's deliberate. And deliberate things can be changed—but only if Nairobi stops scrolling past the problem.
— TrueWire Editorial