Abstract:
Recurrent droughts due to climate change has led to vulnerability of the pastoralist communities, leading to loss
of assets and food insecurity. Climate change will have different impacts on women and men’s livelihoods.
Building resilience at individual, household and community level will largely depend on the suitability of
interventions to the local context, particularly in relation to the social dynamics and power relations that create
differences in vulnerability. Most of the research have focused on national and regional studies. The impact of
climate change will not be uniformly distributed in countries within Africa or within the same country. This
specific research focuses on two diverse ecological zones at the local level in the same County of Turkana in north
western Kenya: agro-pastoral zone and primary pastoral zone. This paper aims to evaluate women and men’s
adaptive capacity to climate variability in Turkana, north-western Kenya. It is evident that increasing resilience
can be realised by reducing vulnerabilities and increasing adaptive capacity. The results revealed that
agro-pastoralists are more resilient to climate change than primary pastoralists. Male headed household are more
resilient than female headed households. Access to basic services is contributing more in the resilience score than
assets, gender of house hold head and age. Generally, few families in this region have very high resilience score
