For Lokolita, cash assistance means food today and a chance to start again

Under the Turkana sun, the queue moves slowly. Families wait for the verification step that comes before cash assistance, after months of drought have worn them down. Among them is Lokolita, a 42-year-old mother of seven from Turkana Central, waiting quietly for her turn.

She is raising her children alone. As the dry spells worsened, the family’s livestock died one animal at a time, taking with them the household’s main source of food and income. Her husband left to look for work and never came back. The calls stopped, and the responsibility for the family settled fully on her.

Now each day begins with the same question: whether there will be enough for the children to eat.

Often, there is not. The family survives on wild fruits gathered during long walks across dry land. “We survive on wild fruits,” she says. Two of her children have been diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition. Hunger has become visible in their bodies.

“As a mother, it is very hard. You see your child becoming weak, and you do not have food to help them. You want them to continue with school, but hunger makes everything difficult,” she says.

What Lokolita is living through is not hers alone. Successive climatic shocks, most recently a prolonged drought, have pushed 3.7 million people across Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands to the brink, with 400,000 already facing emergency levels of hunger. The strain is seen first among children, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women whose own reserves are already thin.

The validation process is the first step in a wider response implemented by World Vision Kenya with support from the Kenya Humanitarian Fund, as part of the Eastern and Southern Africa Humanitarian Fund programme (ESAHF). The cash support Lokolita is waiting for forms part of a 50 million United States dollar allocation directed to families facing acute drought-related hardship. In a severely constrained funding environment, the support is focused on the seven arid and semi-arid counties where needs are highest, as well as the refugee camps in Dadaab and Kakuma.

Through the programme, vulnerable families receive unconditional cash transfers by mobile money over a six-month period, in alignment with government-led coordination and social protection systems. Before any money is transferred, households are identified, registered and validated. Field teams work with communities to confirm household details and prioritise families facing the deepest hardship, including those with malnourished children and little or no income. The unconditional design gives families the flexibility to decide what they need most, based on their own circumstances.

The unconditional design matters. It leaves decisions about what to buy with the family rather than the programme.

For Lokolita, that decision is already clear. The first thing she will buy is food, especially for her two malnourished children.

“When I receive the money, I will buy food for my children so they can eat well and become strong again,” she says.

What matters to her, beyond the food itself, is the freedom to choose.

“I am anticipating the cash, as I can choose and prioritise what to buy. It depends on what we are lacking.”

She is also thinking beyond the next meal. With part of the money, she hopes to buy a few goats and begin rebuilding the herd the drought took from her.

“If I can start again, even small, it will help us sustain ourselves. I am happy because now I know some cash is coming.”

The cash has not yet arrived. For now, there is a queue, a verification step and a mother counting on a transfer that is coming but not yet in her hands.

The support she is waiting for is life-saving and deliberately time-bound: six months in a crisis that returns year after year. Whether the next dry spell finds her with a few goats and some ground regained, or back where she started, is the question this kind of assistance cannot answer on its own.