Water scarcity is an increasingly sever problem across the developing world, with many countries in East Africa already experiencing water shortages or sever water scarcity. Certain trees that are integrated into agricultural systems can increase the efficiency of water use, while plantations of fast-growing trees can exacerbate water shortages and drought.

This has triggered a heated debate: Does planting trees ease or worsen water shortages? Planting trees is great, although using appropriate scientific knowledge to plant the right tree in the right place is even greater.

Plantations of fast-growing evergreen trees, such as Eucalyptus or Pines that consume a lot of water, should be avoided in water-scarce areas. As an alternative, planting deciduous trees, which shed their leaves during dry season, should be encouraged. In addition to consuming less water, these trees can produce a range of valuable products like timber, fruits and fodder.

Scientists address the problem of competition for water between crops and trees by coppicing and root pruning which reduces water requirement of trees and gives crops an added advantage.

These are important lessons for the future, when the effects of climate and expected decline in rainfall will make the water balance effects of trees critical to the management of agricultural landscapes across Africa.

Seki Solonka has a wind-worn face that bears the mark of the 20 or more years she has been tending livestock. She owns 160 hectares where her 30 head of cattle graze. She also admits to having as many goats as sheep. But asking a Maasai how much livestock they actually have is like asking a stranger how much money they have in their savings account. It is rude.

For the Maasai, a person entire self-worth is wrapped up in the livestock they own-cattle, goats, and sheep.” Livestock are just everything,” explains Alex Nkedienye, a maasai who also work as a community facilitator in charge of a Kitengela project working to conserve rangeland diversity.” They are medium of exchange; it is how we pay for things; how we pay our debts. It is our prestige, our standing in society. If I want to take a bride, I must pay for her in cattle. We bond our friendships by giving sheep and goats. When we exchange gifts, we exchange livestock. And all the ceremonies in a Maasai’s life focus around issues of cattle. The meat, the milk that cattle provide, these are things that sustain a family, that sustain our culture.”

But the traditional pastoralist lifestyle of the Kitengela Maasai is under threat. The Maasai community nearest to Nairobi, Kitengela is feeling the encroachment of Nairobi’s urban sprawl and pollution, and of a new, cash-driven society that is buying up pastoral lands and pressuring the Maasai in ways their forefather’s could never have imagined. Unique to the Kitengela equation is Nairobi National Park, where ingress and egress for wildlife is becoming ever more constrained by urban sprawl. The wildlife using the corridor surrounding the park now increasingly moves through adjacent Kitengela.The lions follow and often find the Maasai livestock to be easy pray. Until recently, there seemed little hope of keeping the Maasai from retaliating.

The maasai have always been in conflict with lions and other large predators.” In the wet season, when the zebra and wildebeest move out of the park, the lions try to follow and if they don’t find zebra, they will kill our cattle,” says Alex.” The Maasai always retaliated and killed the lion because our belief is that if you don’t kill the lion, the lion gets habituated to killing the livestock. Domestic livestock is not wild, it’s more docile. It’s easier for the lion to kill.”

Maasai culture has, in fact, been intricately linked to the killing of lions. There came a time in a young mans life when passage to manhood required that he team up with others to kill a lion. “In the last 10 or 15 years this practice has stopped in this area because of a growing emphasis on sending children to school. The more schooling young men receive, the less likely they are to follow the traditional path to manhood,” explains Alex. But other encroachments on Maasai culture and society have not been ameliorated by more education.

Things in Kitengela started going wrong for the Maasai when the land they owned together was parceled out in an ill-conceived loan scheme during the mid-1980s.Once the land was broken up, parcels started disappearing. Some people sold off their land to quarrying, others leased to people who wanted to build nice homes on the outskirts of the city. Suddenly there wasn’t enough space for livestock on roam, and the Maasai found they could not protect their animals in times of drought.

“When you have more land, you can move from place to place when there is no rain,” says Alex. With the kind of fences that went up, with the new presence of people less tolerant of the pastoral lifestyle, it became more difficult. Maasai are very exposed to the vagaries of nature, like rainfall, and if in times of drought they cannot get better pasture areas, they will lose livestock-the essence of their culture and very survival. When this happens, the repercussions can be dramatic.

The Maasai have an abiding respect for wildlife. Apart from retribution against lion, cheetah, and leopard that kill their livestock, they feel they are the original “proprietors” of wildlife. But the reduction of pasturage in Kitengela area means that wild herbivores are increasingly competing with livestock for limited forage. The Maasai blame some of these problems on the Kenya Wildlife Service, which, they feel, does not maintain the park well. “From records we know they used to manage the park very well,” explains Geoffrey Ntapaiya, a young maasai active in the Kitengela community.” But inside the park now, you find very tall, inedible grass. It hasn’t been cut, so the herbivores will move out of the park to where the grass is much shorter, since it has been mown by our animals. The lions follow, and every time they come out, the lions kill cattle and are then killed by the maasai.the conflict are still there.”

“For the past four or five years there has been a debate whether to fence the park,” says Geoffrey.” There are people who want to fence it off, arguing that the animals will remain inside there where the tourists will be able to see them more easily. But in reality, the park is part of a larger ecosystem, and was never meant to stand alone. If you fence the park, you lose an important chunk of that ecosystem, interfere with the natural movement of the animals, and, in fact, endanger their existence.”

The answer to the Kitengela community has been to retie some of the knots undone in their pastoral society when they became land owners. Now the younger generation has organized community groups .And the groups are tackling issues that only two years ago seemed intractable. That was when the Kitengela Ilparakuo Landowners Association (KILA) was formed to give voice to a people who felt they were not being heard by the Kenyan government or the Kenya Wildlife Service.”People began to realize there was only so little they could do as individuals,” says Ntapaiya. ”Many important issues facing the maasai require a collective effort to succeed .This is a reorganization of a formerly organized community, people coming together and trying to have a single voice, where they can deal with common issues, issues that cut across from those of land to natural resources that are shared, to political issues, to having a political voice to lobby the government. And many of these issues pertain to wildlife.”

But the younger Maasai also have an entrepreneurial eye on the country’s greatest asset-wildlife ecotourism .They are meeting with potential developers to see what they can do bring tourists to Kitengela by making eco-friendly havens for the wildlife. “Eco tourism is a way for us to give back to the community. People are already coming to Kitengela to see wildlife. So we should take on the challenge for tourists to see the wildlife here, and bring money to the local people. It has been an eye opener for the community to see that they can make money from the wildlife by protecting it,” says Nicholas Mateiyo, KILA’s secretary.

The patterns revealed in Kitengela are consistent with some important global trends, such as the contraction of pastoral lands and an expansion of agriculture. There is cropping going on where cropping never was before; more and more pastoralists are settling down because of the availability of schools, healthcare, and so forth. This trend is associated with changes in land tenure, a way of communal lands and towards private land ownership, and with a notable decrease in the number of livestock per person (livestock population are more or less stagnant, but the number of people has been increasing rapidly).As these changes progress, the viability of livestock ownership as the sole means of survival is declining, pastoralists are becoming poorer, and their lifestyle is becoming much more tenuous. This pattern is not unique to Kenya or East Africa, but is also being seen in other parts of Africa. There are ways to more accurately map these land use changes and better understand how agro pastoral systems may change due to trends such as increasing population pressure, mounting pressures to diversify income resources, climate change, and other factors.

A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved, a new one arose.

Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to boil. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil, without saying a word.

In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she
ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl.

Turning to her daughter, she asked, "Tell me what you see." "Carrots, eggs, and coffee," she replied. Her mother brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. The mother then asked the daughter to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard boiled egg. Finally, the mother asked the daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled as she tasted its rich aroma. The daughter then asked, "What does it mean, mother?"

Her mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity ... boiling water. Each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard, and
unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened. The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water.

"Which are you?" she asked her daughter. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?" Think of this: Which am I?

Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?

Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other
trial, have I become hardened and stiff? Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and hardened heart?

Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst; you get better and change the situation around you.


When the hour is the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate yourself to another level? How do you handle adversity? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?

May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human and enough hope to make you happy.

The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way. The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past; you can't go forward in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.

Today about three billion people live in cities, or a little fewer than half the worlds’ population. By 2025 the number of the city dwellers will almost double, to some 5.5 billion.60 per cent of a global population which will by then have reached eight billion.

This represents a massive change in the way people live. Most of this change will take place in the developing world. There the drift of people from the country to the cities will increase every year, and whole new cities will be born as existing smaller towns swell to absorb new migrants from the country.

This demographic shift has profound implications for the way food is stored, processed, and distributed after harvest. That in turn has led DFID and its partners to launch a series of intensive studies on urbanization in an attempt to discover just what the phenomenon could mean over the next few years.

Urbanization goes hand in hand with economic development, and most economies in the world are expected to grow in the years ahead. It follows that tomorrow’s city dwellers will be generally wealthier than today’s rural populations. One result will certainly be a rise in spending on food, and a shift in demand from staples to higher value foods, especially fruits, vegetables and meat.

The growth of cities is also bringing about striking changes to that pattern of eating habits among the people who live there. More people tend to eat outside the home, often because they can’t get home from work for a midday meal. At the same time, city families tend to be smaller, nuclear units than their rural equivalents and women of the household are much more likely to go out to work, rather than spend time at home preparing food. As a result, city dwellers eat more snack foods and processed foods of all kinds. They are increasingly prepared to pay for semi-processed foods which were once prepared entirely at home. In Kenya, for example, city dwellers prefer buying pre-cooked maize and beans so as to save time and fuel when preparing the food.

The drift to the cities will also mean striking changes in patterns of employment for those who remain in the country. In most developing nations the number of people actually engaged in work on the farms will probably continue to rise for some time to come, although slowly. But the really rapid growth will be in the rural non-farm sector which embraces a wide variety of activities other than farming-among them food processing, food storage, manufacturing, transport and services. This sector already accounts for somewhere between a quarter and half of all economic activity in rural areas in the developing world. The sector will probably grow to meet changing patterns of demand from the cites.

But DFID-supported research shows that this doesn’t mean that urbanization will automatically lead to more off-farm employment in country areas: It is often more convenient to locate food processing, storage, and transport activities in the cities they have been created to serve. Nor does it follow that farmers will necessarily grow richer because of the increased demand for food from burgeoning urban centers. While city dwellers will be prepared to pay more for food than their counterparts in the country, most of the extra money goes to pay for processing, and little of it is likely to trickle back to the farm.

4 centuries ago you were pure virgin.
Your environs, flora & fauna natural as ever.
Your descendant’s culture held them firm.
Your descendant’s education was unique.
Their religions were normal.
The law they abided to.
The Zulu in the south were brave and strong.
To the west the Hausa thrived.
To the east the Masai were indomitable.
The Beduins to the north persevered to the difficult desert life.
Yet someone somewhere reckoned you uncivilized.

4 centuries ago your descendants gave hospitality to a stranger.
A book on one hand and a gun on the other he enslaved your sons.
Inflicted an inferiority complex on them.
Forced his god upon your descendants.
Grabbed your lands and forced your sons to abide by his laws.
The Zulus did not understand and resiliently fought but lost.
The Hausa persisted but gave in.
The Maji maji rebellion, The Masai and the Beduins were stumbling blocks to the stranger’s success but…..they couldn’t.
All this they did in the name of civilization.

4 centuries later the colonial days are gone, Africa is ‘civilized’
Your environs, flora & fauna tampered with and polluted.
Your people’s culture and religion have perished for the worse.
Your lands have been fragmented.
Your sons are ever at-fighting not for their interest but for those of the ‘super powers’.
Wooden jungles have almost entirely gone.
Up have come concrete jungles .Lagos, Harare, Nairobi is but a few.
Untold misery is the order of the day in these jungles.
Violence, Poverty, Exploitation, Oppression, Segregation, you name it and its there.
All of the helm a few bourgeois, reckon it is civilization.
‘And civilization it is’.