Kenyan Scholars on Kenyan Land: An Inventory of Kenyan Theses and Dissertations on Settlement Schemes in Kenya

Kenyan Scholars on Kenyan Land: An Inventory of Kenyan Theses and Dissertatio... Les Cahiers d'Afrique de l'Est / The East African Review, 58 | 2023 1 period up to 1979.He and others have reported that the smallholder schemes opened up access to land to tens of thousands of Kenyan families (2002, 159). 3In the wake of the intense debates in the literature on agrarian reform and rural and agricultural development in Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s, scholarly attention to Kenya's settlement schemes appears to have declined.In fact, the published literature on the schemes in post-1985 Kenya is so thin that many outside observers believe that the era of smallholder settlement schemes in Kenya came to a close in the early 1980s.Yet the reality is quite different.As Lukalo and Odari (2016) showed in a study sponsored by Kenya's National Land Commission, almost half of all settlement schemes in Kenya (over 500 in total) were created after 1980.The creation of new smallholder settlement schemes and the on-going institutional restructuring of the older ones (through land titling, for example) has remained a central pillar of the Kenyan government's efforts to redress problems of landless, land hunger, and inequality in landholding, and to meet citizens' demands on the state for economic opportunity. 4In 2018, Kenya's National Land Commission-at the time, a young institution that had come into being in 2013 as result of promulgation of the 2010 Kenyan Constitutionforged a partnershp with Professor Catherine Boone of the LSE to conduct an ESRCfunded project that aimed, inter alia, to create a new dataset on the Kenyan Settlement Schemes.Approximately 1,500 digitized Registry Index Maps obtained by the NLc from Survey of Kenya in 2018 were digitized (scheme perimeters only), creating a georeferenced settlement scheme map layer in GIS.The dataset covers 365 out of the 533 schemes (Lukalo et al. 2021; Boone et al. 2021; Lukalo et al. 2019).Background research for the map digitization project spurred an effort to explore the existing but often neglected literature on the Kenyan settlement schemes that is held in the University of Nairobi's holdings of Master's theses and doctoral dissertations. 5In January 2019, Daisy Sibun, (MSc, African Development, LSE) and Graduate Attaché at the British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA) of Nairobi, undertook research on the University of Nairobi (UoN) library's holdings of theses and dissertations on the Kenyan settlement schemes.Sibun retrieved 31 theses defended at UoN written between 1968 and 2015, all studying different aspects of settlements schemes.She compiled a repertoire or inventory of these works, based upon key information about each thesis, including the name of author and his or her faculty supervisor, the UoN department and discipline within which the thesis was conducted, the year of publication, the geographical location of the study, the name of the scheme, and a summary of the thesis.This work provided abundant detail about information on many aspects of many of the settlement schemes, across all the relevant regions of Kenya.The theses and dissertations contained statistical data, results from original household surveys, maps, complication of data from the Kenya agricultural and settlement services, stories of scheme histories, and interview material, along with authors' reflections on and contributions to the theoretical and policy literatures engaged by each study. 6We have been strongly motivated to enhance the visibility of this scholarships by organizing this corpus of information and analysis as an inventory or a semi-archival source of grey literature produced by Kenyan students at the University of Nairobi (plus a few international students who wrote theses at the University of Nairobi).This is the "30 theses" repository.The authors of the present document collaboratively compiled a documentary resource that would be accessible and searchable by another generation of researchers.This new generation could be inspired by it, and could Kenyan Scholars on Kenyan Land: An Inventory of Kenyan Theses and Dissertatio... Les Cahiers d'Afrique de l'Est / The East African Review, 58 | 2023 Kenyan Scholars on Kenyan Land: An Inventory of Kenyan Theses and Dissertatio... Les Cahiers d'Afrique de l'Est / The East African Review, 58 | 2023 Map 1: Spatial Distribution of Settlement Schemes in Kenya (Lukalo et al. 2019, 3).12 This regional dispersion is reflected in the geographical distribution of the theses inventoried in this document.Table 2 lists settlement schemes featured in the UoN theses and dissertations by province.Many of the featured schemes lie in the Rift Valley, Central, and Western Provinces (as these were defined between 1962 and 2010) that were the geographic locus of the so-called White Highlands, where the British settlers acquired land at the beginning of the 20 th century.These areas were targeted for Africanization of property and redistribution of land from the years in the run-upto Independence in 1963 through the mid-to-late 1970s.Schemes were created in other regions of Kenya, especially the Coast and Eastern, over time.Nyanza Kisii Nyansiongo Settlement