Upcoming Kenyan Elections

The International Crisis Group published on 30 May 2017 a report titled "Kenya's Rift Valley: Old Wounds, Devolution's New Anxieties."

The report concludes that while major Kikuyu versus Kalenjin conflict is unlikely during elections scheduled for August 2017, serious local violence is possible, particularly as the creation of new counties run by powerful locally-elected officials has increased the stakes of political competition.

Judicial Reform in Kenya's Southern Rift Valley

The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law published in 2015 a study titled "Access to Justice, Impunity and Legal Pluralism in Kenya" by Jurg Helbling, Walter Kalin and Prosper Nobirabo.  The authors argue that legal pluralism reforms of the judiciary aimed at facilitating access to justice are suitable to address cases of functional impunity if such reforms manage to restore the trust of people in state institutions.  They are likely to fail where the reasons for impunity and its underlying conflicts are structural in nature.

Predicting Food Shortages in the Horn of Africa

Smithsonian magazine published in its May 2015 edition a long article titled "The Sheltering Sky" by Ariel Sabar.     

While the article discusses the role of satellite imagery in the Horn of Africa to detect unusual spikes in land temperature, the main focus is Ethiopia and Gabriel Senay, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.  He designed a system that uses NASA satellites to identify anomalies that can signal crop failure.  Senay's algorithms plot these hot zones along a strip of the Rift Valley normally thought of as a breadbasket.