By Sydner Kemunto, 2025 Dryland Restoration Steward

Kaani is a rural landscape in east-central Kenya, marked by open drylands and scattered homesteads. 

The land stretches across gentle slopes, with patches of acacia trees and farmland that turn dusty brown in the dry season and briefly green after short rains. 

Most households depend on farming for food and income, growing maize, cowpeas, pigeon peas and cassava in small plots, as well as tending livestock such as goats and chickens. 

But what really sustains us is how we share knowledge of our lands.

When it comes to land restoration, scientific knowledge is often treated as the source of all solutions. Data, measurements and models are often presented as the foundation for action. 

Yet these systems are limited when applied to landscapes like Kaani. They can overlook local circumstances, respond too slowly to immediate challenges and fail to capture the social and cultural dimensions of resilience that are essential to survival in drylands.

Restoration cannot depend on scientific expertise alone. 

As soils become increasingly degraded and rainfall patterns more unpredictable, survival relies on more than just external interventions.

Indigenous knowledge, carried through practice, memory and storytelling, provides strategies that are immediately relevant and rooted in generations of lived experience. 

When placed alongside science, these community systems create a fuller understanding of how to regenerate land and sustain livelihoods.

Resilience through mutual aid

Community learning is central to this process. In Kaani, land-based knowledge isn’t shared in classrooms or through formal training. Instead, knowledge circulates at small meetings, local events and gatherings where farmers exchange what they have observed and learned.

People discuss which crops are coping with the heat, what pests are emerging and which methods are helping to conserve soil and water. These informal ways of sharing ensure that lessons are spread quickly and adapted to the local context.

In climate literature, there is growing recognition of the value of community-based adaptation. Resilience in drylands cannot rely solely on external technologies but must be rooted in practices that communities already use to cope with scarcity. 

In Kaani, informal networks of exchange form one of our strongest adaptation strategies. No farmer faces the uncertainty of the seasons alone. Instead, they count on their neighbors’ observations, lessons and encouragement.

This form of knowledge sharing challenges the idea that credibility must come from laboratories or written reports. In our communities, credibility is tested in the field.

Indigenous foods form the backbone of resilience in dryland communities. Crops such as cowpeas and cassava have carried families through difficult seasons when introduced maize hybrids failed.

The history of maize in Kenya is tied to colonial and post-colonial agricultural policies, which promoted the use of hybrid seeds to increase production for both domestic markets and export.

These hybrids were often distributed through government and donor programs with the promise of higher yields, but they required reliable rainfall, chemical inputs and regular seed purchases. 

In dryland areas, where rainfall is unpredictable and resources are limited, these hybrids often withered, leaving households vulnerable. 

Seed banks at home

By contrast, indigenous foods that had been cultivated for generations continued to grow under the same harsh conditions. They remain central to nutrition, food security and preserving cultural ties to the land.

One notable example is the use of gourds to preserve seeds. Traditional gourds remain a common way to store seeds because they protect them from pests and moisture without requiring chemical treatment.

Alongside gourds, farmers also repurpose bottles, tins and small containers, which provide airtight conditions that help maintain seed quality for several months.

These methods are affordable, easy to manage and well adapted to our dryland environment, where resources are limited.

Many families treat their homes as small seed banks, keeping reserves of cowpeas, millet and pigeon peas ready for use or exchange. During community events, farmers bring portions of these seeds to share or swap, ensuring that varieties continue to circulate across households. 

Some groups of farmers are also developing collective seed banks, where members contribute surplus harvests into a shared pool. This builds resilience by providing backups in case one farmer loses a crop to drought or pests.

Sowing the seeds of solidarity

These simple practices resist the modern pressure to commercialize seeds or send them for scientific testing.

External actors often promote testing to improve resilience or to catalogue genetic varieties, which can be useful in broader research. However, in my community, our value system emphasizes keeping seeds within the local context. 

Farmers in Kaani have tried growing ‘improved’ maize varieties that ultimately failed to withstand our long dry spells. Meanwhile, indigenous millet and pigeon peas continued to thrive even with little rain. 

This reinforces our belief that seeds adapt best when they remain in the same soil and climate where they have grown for generations. Passing them within the community ensures that they stay acclimatized to local conditions and accessible to all. 

This system builds trust, protects food diversity and keeps farmers, not external institutions, in control of food security. 

Honoring indigenous foods also honors the values they represent. Sharing seeds is not only about ensuring a harvest – it’s about reminding each other that food security is collective.

No household should face hunger while another has plenty.

Growing food in Kaani’s drylands is not just a technical challenge but a test of solidarity. The soil is dry, the sun often unyielding and each harvest is unpredictable. Yet, even in scarcity, farmers help one another.

If one family struggles to weed their field before the rains, their neighbors step up to help. When a farmer experiments with a new crop variety, they share the results at the next community gathering. 

Farmers usually acquire new seeds through local markets, extension programs or exchanges with neighbors, and they often plant them alongside traditional varieties to see how they respond to heat, pests or erratic rainfall. 

If a new seed thrives under these conditions, the knowledge spreads across households; if it fails, it spreads just as quickly, saving others from suffering the same loss. 

In Kaani, resilience is never a private matter – it is communal.

Rewriting the story of our food

One of the ways Kaani resists imposed climate narratives is through storytelling. For many of our elders, stories carry the logic of the land, the patterns of seasons and the memory of past hardships.

Mzee Nzioka, an elder respected for his wisdom, describes storytelling as a practical body of knowledge:

“When I was young, a part of our duties after harvest was to sit down and shell maize together. We would then help in separating what was to be eaten from what needed to be stored. 

Some of the maize was kept in the granary, while a portion was carefully placed in bottles mixed with ashes to protect it from pests. These were simple household tasks, but they carried lessons. 

These stories were not written, but we remembered. They guided us. Even now, when we share seeds, we are also sharing the stories of how they survived.

That is why the seed is powerful. It comes with memory.”

By preserving seeds locally, passing down stories and prioritizing sharing over selling, our people are pushing back against a narrow narrative of what restoration and food sovereignty can look like. 

For us as Kaani people, restoration is a process rooted in history, culture and mutual trust. It’s both ecological and social – a recognition that regenerating the land cannot be separated from regenerating the values of community life.

Looking ahead, we face many challenges. Rainfall patterns are shifting unpredictably, soils continue to degrade and younger generations are being pulled to the cities.

Cities are often seen to offer more stable jobs, access to education and modern amenities that are harder to find in rural areas. 

Yet there is also a strong movement to hold onto what defines our identity: our seed-sharing culture, the indigenous foods that withstand drought and the principle of collective wellbeing.

“There is a saying in our community: Mwacha mila ni mtumwa – those who leave their culture become a slave,” says Nzioka. “We cannot abandon what has kept us alive.”

“The land may be changing, but the seed and the story remind us who we are. If we keep honoring them, our children will still eat even when the rains come late.”

Indigenous knowledge is the beating heart of restoration and regenerating degraded drylands in Kaani. By sharing it, we’re keeping restoration grounded in our context, culture and lived experiences.

Our knowledge is our resilience.