KIVULINI TRUST CENTRES FOR CULTURE, INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING IN NORTHERN KENYA

The Place for Culture Based Experiential Learning

Like many other indigenous peoples in Kenya, the Gabbra are facing the threats of losing their cultural heritage including customs, value system and indigenous knowledge. This loss of attachment to values among the younger generation is associated with among other factors, the formal education system at the national level to which children have increasingly gained access.

The education system reduces home-based transmission of indigenous knowledge and promotes the process of assimilation of indigenous children into mainstream alien lifestyle. Children are thus uprooted from home and deprived the opportunity to learn and practice their own culture at a very early age.

As a result of diminished contact with their cultural and natural environment, younger generations are rapidly losing their knowledge of the ecosystem as well as interest in their culture and traditions.

The development of cultural education for children and youth helps reinforce who they are and to be proud of their own culture and traditional belief systems. This will also help reorient the youth who drop out of school for one reason or other and who are then ill-equipped to go back to their community’s way of life.

Such education will revitalize the cultural practices, promote relationships among generations, ensure cultural transmission and combined with formal education, offer the child the best of both worlds.

Project title: Support for culturally appropriate and place based education for the Gabbra community.

Project description: To facilitate the development of a curriculum and syllabus that forms the basis for the teaching of Gabbra culture and of pastoralism to the youth of the community. The process is driven by the Gabbra Yaa assemblies – the ritual and political centres of the community and facilitated by Kivulini Trust.

Grantee: Kivulini Trust

Grantor: The Christensen Fund

Project period: September 2009- October 2010

Cattle herding

Camel herding

Gabbra children participating in a sorio ritual

Ceremonial milk sharing