Kajiado District Information

Information about the Kajiado District.

The Kajiado District is approximately the size of Israel and is located at the southern tip of the Rift Valley Province. It is bordered by Tanzania to the southwest and the districts of Taita Taveta (to the south east), Machakos (to the east), Nairobi (to the north east), Kiambu (to the north) and Narok (to the west).

The indigenous peoples of the area are the Maasai but there is an increasing influx of peoples from other tribal groups.

The Kajiado District has a population of around 400,000. Nearly 50% of the population being in the age range 0 to 14 years.

The landscape consists of plains plus some volcanic hills and valleys. The region is very dry with no continually flowing rivers and is officially designated as semi-arid. The annual rainfall varies between 500 and 1,250mm.

There are two wet seasons, the ‘short rains’ between October and December and the ‘long rains’ between March and May. In recent years there have been long periods of drought when there has been little or no rain.

Life is extremely hard for the Maasai pastoralists who make up the majority of the population. This hampers efforts to encourage agriculture as an alternative to cattle rearing. People tend to give up on a system where crop failure is a far too common occurrence. The picture, on the right at the top, shows what happened in the year 2000 after a prolonged period of drought.

Maasai women and children usually do most of the household work. The picture, on the right at the bottom, shows a women collecting water from a shallow well dug into the bottom of a dried up river bed.

The picture on the left, shows a woman on her way back to her Boma after collecting wood for use in fires for cooking.

If the children go to school they have to take some wood so that the school meal can be cooked. No wood no meal. This may be the only meal a child would get.

The trust and its predecessors have been funding projects throughout the district for over 18 years.