Surviving the Drought in Kenya

In Africa, unlike in Europe, droughts are nothing new. But like everywhere else, they too are lasting longer and are more extreme - the consequences of global warming remain undisputed. Combined with the war in Ukraine, they led to skyrocketing food prices and showed how dependent Africa had become on imports.

Ruth Oniang'o, one of Africa's first female nutrition professors, shows that Africa, or in this case Kenya, is quite capable of feeding itself. The 75-year-old has already convinced more than 100,000 farmers in western Kenya to switch to cultivating local varieties to combat the increasingly unpredictable seasons. A trend that is growing internationally, but native varieties are only part of the solution. In Turkana, the barren north of Kenya, there has been a drought for three years. People have lost almost all their livestock, forcing nomadic pastoralists in Turkana to redefine their millennia-old traditions. Billy Kapua, the son of a cattle breeder, has been fighting for the survival of his people for years and shows how a mixture of traditional lifestyles with modern methods could work.