In 2008, Ikal Angelei sat in a research center at the Turkana Basin Institute when she learned about a dam being built across the border in Ethiopia. The Gibe III Dam, she quickly realized, would reshape the future of Lake Turkana and the Indigenous communities who have depended on it for centuries. Rather than accept the decision made without their voices, Angelei founded Friends of Lake Turkana — a grassroots organization determined to amplify the people being excluded from the process. Four years later, in 2012, her advocacy earned her the Goldman Environmental Prize.
For the Turkana people, change is not new. Across generations, they have survived by moving — shifting between pastoralism, fishing, farming, and trade as the landscape itself shifted and demanded adaptation. What environmental change meant to them was movement; what it required was flexibility. But the pressures converging on the lake today are unprecedented in their scale and speed. Increasingly erratic climate patterns, dwindling fisheries, oil development, and infrastructure projects like LAPSSET (a transport corridor) are all pressing down at once. The ground is so bare that when rain does come, it floods off rather than seeping in — so the region can experience both floods and famine in the same season. This is not purely a climate crisis, Angelei explains. It is the crisis of climate change layered atop decades of neglect and a development model that extracts more than it sustains.
The coping mechanisms that once sustained Turkana communities — like drying meat, storing food, and migrating across large territories — have been eroded or lost. Migration routes have shrunk. Grazing lands have shrunk. Resources have depleted. Yet people continue to adapt, sometimes in ways that seem counterintuitive: they catch undersized fish because they need to eat today; they overfish because external programs haven't adapted to their actual needs. "The lake has been a place where those at the bottom — the poorest — get their livelihoods," Angelei says. "But as the economic value of the lake increases, there is a risk that they will be pushed out." This is the central threat: not merely environmental stress, but economic exclusion. As capital flows in from outside and infrastructure projects multiply, the poorest risk being displaced entirely — locked out of the very place their ancestors have called home.
What gives Angelei hope is history itself. The Turkana have always adapted to change, and that adaptive capacity remains. But adaptation alone is not enough. What's needed is justice — collective social, economic, cultural, environmental, and territorial justice. Friends of Lake Turkana continues to work toward that vision, insisting that the communities at the lake's center must have a real voice in decisions about its future. The question is whether those decisions will be made with them or despite them.