Marsabit County

Marsabit exists because the desert exists—specifically, because oases and highlands punctuate Kenya's northern frontier, creating habitable islands in an otherwise hostile landscape. Mount Marsabit rises from the Chalbi Desert, its forested summit catching moisture that sustains the town below. Lake Turkana's shoreline provides another thin margin of survival. The Borana, Gabra, Rendille, and Samburu peoples developed pastoral systems adapted to this extremity.

The 21st century discovered energy wealth beneath this poverty. Lake Turkana Wind Power, Africa's largest wind farm, operates its 365 turbines at Loiyangalani within Marsabit County—generating 310 MW, 15-17% of Kenya's grid capacity. Now KenGen plans an even larger project: 200 MW initially, potentially scaling to 1,000 MW at sites like Bubisa, where wind speeds average 11 meters per second, among sub-Saharan Africa's highest.

Yet energy wealth flows outward while the county remains Kenya's most drought-vulnerable. The 2025 drought ranked among the most damaging since 2020, with 1.7 million Kenyan children at malnutrition risk—many in Marsabit. Wind turbines power Nairobi while pastoralists lose livestock to thirst. The pattern echoes Turkana: resource extraction without proportional local benefit.

The county exhibits classic extractive development: enormous natural resources—wind, potentially oil—generate national wealth while local poverty persists. By 2026, whether the new KenGen project includes meaningful community benefits will test if Kenya has learned from Turkana's complaints—or whether Marsabit becomes another case of energy flowing out while development fails to flow in.