Wednesday, 3 December 2014

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Profile:Mandera County



Mandera County is one of the 47 counties in Kenya, located in the north eastern part of the country and borders Ethiopia to the North, Somalia to the East and Wajir County to the South. It is 1,100km from Nairobi. The county has a population of 1,025,756 and covers an area of 25,991.5km².
The County is subdivided into six sub counties: Mandera West, Mandera South, Banisa, Mandera North, Mandera East, and Lafey and 30 wards.
Mandera is characterised by low lying rocky hills located on the plains that rise gradually from 400 meters above sea level in the south at Elwak to 970 metres above sea level on the border with Ethiopia. The rest of the topography is low lying, characterised by dense vegetation with thorny shrubs. The flat terrain makes drainage very poor, causing floods during heavy rain downpours. There are no lakes, swamps or dams but earth pans are a common.

Ecological conditions
There are two ecological zones in the county:  Arid and semi-arid. Ninety five per cent of the county is semi-arid with dense vegetation mainly thorny shrubs and bushes along foots of isolated hills and mathenge trees along gullies.
Mandera has an area of 25,991.5 km². Most of the land is rangeland supporting livestock production. Availability of water is the critical factor for agricultural production hence the concentration of crop production along River Daua and other places with laggas where water collects.
Generally the soils in most parts of the county are fertile since they have not been exploited. There are a few areas where soil acidity does not allow for arable crop production. Forty thousand hectares is under irrigation but only 15,000-20,000ha has the potential to be fully exploited. The area under rain-fed agriculture is very low considering that reliability of rainfall is below 30 per cent.
Unemployment rate in the county stands at 69 per cent. This can be attributed to factors such as low literacy levels, limited  opportunities,  limited  financial credit facilities, which are Sharia compliant, non-functional vocational training institutions, dependency on aid,  and  frequent  conflicts  among  the communities, which disrupts the normal functioning of society.