By late morning along Kaito beach on the western banks of Lake Turkana, the heat beating down from the sun is already deadly hot. A cluster of villagers, mostly women, flock around boats docked from an overnight fishing voyage. They’re engrossed in gutting and washing the catches as children and several litters of puppies splash about the shallow waters; young men sort through the near-translucent nets in preparation for the following day’s trip. But underneath the buzz of energy is some anxiety, tinged with gloom—today, the fish barely fill a few baskets.
“This is all we got,” says one of the fishers, 24-year-old Teresa Ekutan. “It’s hardly enough to feed us all.”
The catches have been sparse for a few weeks now, Lochampa Ekingol tells Mongabay. At 32, she lives in one of the few dozen akai akamatei (straw huts) a mere stone’s throw away from the lake with her seven children. In 2017, Ekingol opted to leave behind her life of herding and move from Lowarengak town—a two-hour walk on sandy roads in fierce heat—for closer proximity to the lake to take up fishing. In the face of the current severe drought putting millions of lives and livestock at risk in Kenya and the Horn of Africa, she and the fifty or so other villagers who came with her are part of a growing wave of pastoralists switching livelihoods to fish in the world’s largest desert lake.
Attracted by both the water and fish within its depths, these villagers are part of Turkana’s booming fishing industry. But potential overfishing, the use of illegal fishing gear and a tilapia fish smuggling network are contributing to concerns about the lake’s fish populations, worrying environmentalists, authorities, and fishers alike. Though it’s difficult to assess exact fish populations, fishers have noticed a smaller catch in recent weeks.
Even before the current succession of five missed rainy seasons ravaging Kenya and the Horn of Africa, several of Ekingol’s 20 cattle were faring poorly in the desiccating environment from heat stress and starvation. She sold the survivors to support her move to join the region’s booming fish economy.