The goals of this research have been to measure and descriptively document the daily lives and wellbeing of East African pastoralist adolescents. The anthropological literature on childhood and adolescence is still growing and greater understanding of East African pastoralist young people's lives is needed. Pastoralist adolescents contribute the bulk of labor to their communities, often engaging in tasks that involve high energetic expenditure and physical risk during long days spent with inadequate access to water and food in a region subject to recurring extreme drought and chronic intercommunity violence.

The intellectual merits of this study include findings of importance to anthropological theory, ethnography, and biological anthropology. The study's methods integrate epidemiology, ethnography, and also auto-ethnography through the sharing of adolescent participants' photography and extended photo captions. The result is the production of a rich dataset on the livelihood activities, risks, joys, and vulnerabilities of Samburu pastoralist young people ages 10-20 years old. Vulnerabilities have been measured in several ways: ethnographic participant-observation, daily activities (including reports of injuries and corporal punishment), nutritional outcomes (through anthropometric data and micronutrient assessment), immune function (two biomarkers), traumatic exposures, food and water insecurity, and experienced emotional distress. Key findings to date show that pastoralist adolescents, both boys and girls, have body mass index values well below World Health Organization international reference standards and are subject to food and water insecurity, and emotional distress. Girls in remoter areas are particularly vulnerable with respect to food quality, access to education, and emotional wellness. An additional important finding is that, consistent with adolescent experiences globally, both boys and girls among the study's young participants reported experiences of sexual trauma.

It is important to emphasize that, on the whole, these young people do not exhibit depression and desperation but rather, daily moments of joy with their parents and peers, as well as hope for the future. Nevertheless, their challenges are poignant. Young people described periods of hunger in all seasons and lack of access to water particularly during dry seasons. Access to clean water was a particular source of stress, even for those closest to deep wells. During the most recent drought (2016-2017), reports of illness due to contaminated water were highest among girls in the remoter site (80%) and lowest in boys in the site closer to infrastructure, a substantial 37% of whom nevertheless reported illness they attributed to contaminated water. These young people also routinely experience risk from predators such as hyenas, leopards, and lions, as well as risk of intercommunity and domestic violence. In the study site closer to state infrastructure, 33% of girls and 27% of boys reported having to leave a place quickly due to violence, and in the site remote from state infrastructure 51% of girls and 13% of boys reported leaving quickly due to violence. Once young girl said, "Our cows were all raided by the Turkana and we've been left with nothing," while another girl, describing the emotional impact of a death of someone she knew, said, "Elephants killed someone and made me scared and sad." One boy stated, "During the drought we had to sleep hungry because there wasn't food. Also, all the water we had at home got finished and several times when I was looking after our animals there was no water in the pasture areas...Warriors stole cattle from a [nearby] ranch and as the warriors passed our home the soldiers found them. There was serious fire exchanged and I felt like I would die, I was so scared."

The integration of young people's voices and experiences with interdisciplinary methods that assess their emotional and physical wellbeing provide a rich and important portrait of contemporary pastoralist adolescence. The dataset promises to enrich our understanding of adolescence in terms of potential public health interventions, descriptively and analytically from a culturally-particular perspective rooted in state and global political-economic realities, and analytically with respect to the evolution of human childhood.

The study's broader impacts include fostering international collaborations with Kenyan colleagues; training ten U.S. and Kenyan university students in field methods, ethics, and data entry and analysis; and targeting under-represented pastoralist university students in particular for training and field experience opportunities. Students have served as co-authors of national conference presentations and are co-authoring published papers. Additionally, the project has been making an impact on local pastoralist indigenous communities through knowledge transfer to regional health programs concerned with adolescent health and well-being, and free health assessments and referrals of the most vulnerable for follow up care. The study's findings are also being transferred to humanitarian stakeholders in Kenya and the United States. As analyses continue, and as a group of researchers put their eyes on this data set, extremely useful and socially relevant contributions to global health, as well as scholarly literatures are expected.

Last Modified: 11/23/2018
Modified by: Bilinda S Straight