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If, as the evidence seemed to suggest, a major cause of famine was inadequate
purchasing power, bolstering purchasing power should be a key response. The plan
envisaged an employment guarantee offering paid work for anyone who had no other
source of income. It also proposed a programme of emergency animal purchase in
order to prevent a collapse in livestock prices. These and other measures were
included in a district drought contingency plan, prepared by the district authorities
before the drought, and contained detailed instructions for activities to be undertaken
to prevent drought turning into famine. The preparation process would include the
development of a register of pre-planned and costed public works projects.
11.2
Implementation and Expansion of the System
The Turkana district early warning and contingency planning system described in
Jeremy Swift's report was endorsed by the district authorities and implemented by
the Turkana Drought Contingency Planning Unit (TDCPU) and the TRP. The
TDCPU was an independent technical unit set up in 1987 to run the drought early
warning system with the fi nancial support of the Norwegian government. In 1988
this was formalised into a District Drought Management Committee (DDMC), an
inter-departmental committee chaired by the District Commissioner with the power
to manage all drought-related activities. The TRP provided the means for comple-
mentary rapid response.
In 1992 this system was expanded to a further four districts in the north and
northwest of Kenya (Samburu, Isiolo, Marsabit and Moyale) through the Dutch-
funded Drought Monitoring Project (DMP). Early warning information was gathered
by a network of monitors across the fi ve districts and published in monthly bulletins.
Response and recovery activities were implemented by a group of 12 NGOs.
The successor to the DMP was the Drought Preparedness Intervention and
Recovery Programme (DPIRP), which operated in the same districts but with a
larger number (54) of implementing partners. The DPIRP introduced a community
development component. It also benefi ted from fl exibility and autonomy in the use
of its funds, just as TRP had before it.
A third initiative - the Emergency Drought Recovery Programme (EDRP) -
complemented the DMP in the northeast of Kenya between 1992 and 1995.
Implementation took place through government departments rather than NGOs. It
focused on quick-fi x projects, the experience of which reinforced the case for long-
term interventions in arid lands.
All three of these projects fed into the Arid Lands Resource Management Project
(ALRMP), which was implemented by the Government of Kenya between 1996 and
2010. For the fi rst few years, the ALRMP focused on those districts where the
DPIRP was not operational. It maintained the early warning system, managed a
donor-fi nanced contingency fund for rapid response, supported community devel-
opment activities and introduced drought coordination structures at both the national
and the district levels.
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