Changing the desert into green farmland

“Mandera has virgin fertile soils, plenty of water from River Daua, all season

sunshine. With the right technology and crop care we are targeting

commercial scale production.” - Johora Mohamed Abdi, CEC Agriculture, Irrigation,

Livestock,Fisheries and Veterinary Services

 For many years Mandera was associated with sands, vast dry lands and a vulnerable people who begged for food and water whenever famine struck. Today, devolution has radically changed the County’s narrative and made farming a success story that baffles many. The drought-threatened arid lands have been turned into high impact green farms through irrigation along its rivers and dams and Mandera County is being converted into a food basket.Spurred by the need to create more arable land and produce more food, Mandera’s farms are expanding into the desert and the local community is slowly graduating from pastoralism and extreme poverty vulnerable to drought to sustainable agriculture.

Some 4,100 hectares of land are already under irrigation to produce maize, sorghum, cowpeas, onions, mangoes, sunflower, bananas and tomatoes. The race is on to tap the entire potential of 15,000 hectares.The County Government has put agriculture at the core of its growth plan. Its approach is simple, find the markets, create competitive paths to them and show farmers the way.

With irrigation, Mandera County Government has found a new and diversified source of income, where locals can feed their families, pay for school fees and medical care, accumulate savings for long-term stability, survive drought and adapt to a changing climate. By linking farmers to buyers through contract farming, a healthy local agricultural economy is beginning to emerge. Two years into devolution, Mandera is emerging as a shining example of how to improve food insecurity and spur subsistence farming in arid lands.

“We have been on a farming revival mission. We have converted farms, which were full of weeds into crop producing tracts. An agricultural department that was literally dead has been revived into a robust productive sector,” Governor Ali Roba says. “In 24 months we revived the agricultural sector and the farms are green almost through the years. We register bumper harvests and have a variety of food and cash crops.”

The County Executive Committee member for Agriculture Johora Mohamed Abdie, says the trick has been in reviving all failed irrigation farms that were abandoned. “We provided farmers with seeds, fertilizers and tractors at subsidized rates to encourage residents to return to farming and prosper agriculture. “The County is highly placed as a fruit producing County due to favorable climatic conditions for production of high value crops like mangoes, banana, and guavas. Johora Mohamed Abdi: “Mandera has virgin

fertile soils, plenty of water from River Daua sunshine all season, with the right technology and crop care we are targeting commercial scale production.”

 

A farmer weeding melon in his farm along Daua River

The river covers about 150 kilometres along Kenya’s border with Ethiopia and flows through Malkamari, Rhamu Dimtu, Rhamu, Libehia, Khalalio and Township wards into Somalia at Border Point 1. Governor Roba says, “The County urgently needs more farmland, and its only option is to reclaim land from the desert and revive agriculture through irrigation. The County’s ministry of agriculture has been working with farmers to transform the sandy wastes into profitable farmland, and to bring services and amenities to the communities that settle there. Since its coming into existence following devolution in 2013, the County Government will have injected Ksh950 million by the end of the current financial year, more than half of which will be invested in agricultural development as opposed to recurrent expenses.