Transforming Education and Development Policies for Pastoralist Communities in Kenya

Book excerpt: This study is a contribution towards exploring alternative but sustainable education policies for pastoralist societies and sets out to explore how pastoralist IKSs (Indigenous Knowledge Systems) can be integrated or used as an entry point to provide formal schooling to pastoralist communities in Kenya. Pastoralists constitute the majority of the socially and economically vulnerable groups in the country. Children, among pastoralist communities, face detrimental hardships that compromise their growth and development. One of these hardships is the imposition of an education and development paradigm that is irrelevant to their existence and which compounds their problems. This study therefore sought to explore how, through better government policies, the indigenous knowledge (IK) of pastoralists could be integrated into the curriculum of formal schooling. Specifically, the study discusses the following issues: Gaps in policies for schooling provision for pastoralist groups, with particular reference to the content of the curriculum and methods of delivery; Aspects of pastoralist IKS that can be integrated into the context of national education policy to enrich their schooling within; and General recommendations regarding the use of participatory and social engineering approaches in designing education and development policies affecting pastoralist communities in Kenya.