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Background: Households with alloparents, individuals other than the mother who care for an infant, can shift members' roles and affect mother–infant health. Aims: To investigate how household composition relates to infant feeding and infectious disease risk in mother–infant dyads, the team utilized data from breastfeeding dyads (n 208) surveyed during a prolonged drought and food scarcity in northern Kenya. Methods: Households were classified by the presence/absence of potential alloparents, distinguishing non‐siblings and siblings of the infant. Regression models for breastfeeding frequency, complementary feeding status, and recent infections (n 83) evaluated these outcomes' associations with household type while accounting for food insecurity, adjusted for infant age, infant sex, and maternal age. Results: Household type was unassociated with breastfeeding frequency, but the presence of non‐sibling alloparents interacted with food insecurity, predicting increasing breastfeeding frequency as food insecurity intensified among dyads living with non‐sibling alloparents. Households with non‐sibling alloparents were also inversely associated with complementary feeding but had no association with infection. Households with siblings were inversely associated with (protective against) infant and maternal infection. Conclusion: Further research is needed to understand the interactive influence of household social and food ecologies on mother–infant diet and health under diverse cultural rules and norms for alloparenting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Interdisciplinary borrowing between ecology and the social sciences has produced numerous insights about pastoral livelihood practices and rangeland ecology, demonstrating how people practicing pastoralism constantly modify their practices to adapt to social, political, economic, and biophysical change. Objectives: I outline an approach for integrating research on pastoral livelihoods into a landscape ecology framework. I focus on access to land and resources, and an integrative approach to scale, to assess the relationship between landscape and social processes. Methods: I use remotely sensed data and ethnographic analysis of livelihood change in two semi-arid contexts in Kenya to compare broad scale changes in pastoral mobility to spatio-temporal patterns of variability in rainfall and vegetation productivity. I then synthesize the political, economic, and social relations that have most prominently influenced access to land and restructured landscape process at finer scales. Results: Spatial controls have been imposed on land use that have increasingly partitioned landscapes and concentrated pastoral access to land. Access to land has also been influenced by changes in social norms, employment, and market relations. Informal rules and norms, social differentiation, and exclusionary partitions have produced socially differentiated land use intensity gradients and novel landscape processes that have not previously been considered in landscape analyses in Kenya. Conclusions: Understanding access, land use, and landscape processes as intertwined, with uneven processes of land and resource capture at different scales, would enable landscape ecologists to choose observational scales relevant to rural livelihoods and sensitive to power asymmetries, creating robust analytical linkages between social and ecological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young women in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be disproportionately at risk for HIV. Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can reduce women's HIV risk when taken daily throughout their "seasons of risk". We used photovoice to describe community views on factors influencing interruptions in PrEP use among young cisgender women in Siaya County, Kenya. Through group discussions, young women taking PrEP and their social network members (female peers, male peers/partners, family, and community members) shared photographs and identified broad social-ecological causes of PrEP interruptions, including: (1) widespread misinformation about PrEP, (2) social pressures from religious communities, (3) health care staff recommendations to interrupt PrEP use, (4) partner rejection of PrEP, (5) changes in women's risk awareness, and (6) a personal desire to occasionally pause daily use. Collectively, participants identified strategies to address these challenges. These findings can inform future programs targeting the broader social-ecological influences on young women's persistent use of PrEP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putting research on the socio-political effects of Kenya's new Standard Gauge Railway in conversation with geographically and anthropologically grounded scholarship on infrastructure, the article analyses how megaprojects, in spite of state spectacles of infrastructure-qua-development, are embroiled in multiple modalities of ruination. It specifically highlights how mega-infrastructures disrupt ecologies of social reproduction: the new railway disorders people's mobility patterns and their access to essential infrastructures, as well as decouples their labour from transport systems and informal road economies central to self-sustainment. The article conceptualises these intersections between infrastructure's spectacle and ruination as disquieting ambivalence of infrastructure. Shifting from spectacle to ruination – rather than oscillating between the two – this ambivalence is not one of uncertainty, malleability, or open-ended futures that are analysed in recent strands of critical scholarship on infrastructure, in which material devastation is often bracketed due to this literature's predominant focus on multiple temporalities of infrastructure as heterogeneous possibilities of reconfiguration. The article, instead, shows that this ambivalence of infrastructure is disquieting – fraught with precarity, struggle, and despair, as the lives of those in shadows of mega-infrastructures need to be rebuilt within the ruins of the here and now, and of infrastructure's spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Injecting drug users are at high risk of HIV infection globally. Research related to female drug users is rare in Kenya, yet it is required to inform the development of gender-sensitive HIV prevention and harm reduction services in East Africa, where injecting drug use is on the rise. Methods: This study aimed to document the nature of HIV risks encountered by women who inject drugs in the Mombasa and Kilifi, Kenya. Secondary data analysis was conducted on an existing dataset from a 2015 primary qualitative study involving 24 interviews and 3 focus group discussions with 45 women who inject drugs. These were complemented with five interviews with key stakeholders involved in the provision of services to women who inject drugs. Guided by the social ecology theory, a thematic analysis was conducted to identify the nature of HIV risks and their underlying determinants. Results: HIV risk behaviours fell into two broad categories: unsafe injecting and unprotected sex. These risks occurred in the form of sharing of needles, unprotected oral, anal, and vaginal sex, sexual assaults, injecting drug use during sex, sex work, and other types of transactional sex. The primary determinants underlying these risks were a low-risk perception, inequitable gender power, economic pressures, and poor availability of needles and condoms. These social-ecological determinants did not exist in isolation, but intersected with each other to create powerful influences which exposed women to HIV. Social-ecological determinants exerted constant influence and created a persistent 'HIV risk environment' that was involuntarily experienced by women. Conclusion: Individual, interpersonal, and societal-structural factors intersect to produce HIV risk behaviours. As a minimum, these risks will require a combination of multifaceted micro-level interventions including self-efficacy training, risk assessment skills, couple counselling, and universal access to the recommended harm reduction package. In addition, the current focus on micro-level interventions in Kenya needs to shift to incorporate macro-level interventions, including livelihood, employability, and gender norms-transforming interventions, to mitigate economic and gender-related drivers of HIV risks. In the Kenyan context, injecting drug use during sex work is emerging as an increasingly important HIV risk behaviour needing to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations in social-ecological systems to overturn poverty and ecosystem degradation require approaches to knowledge synthesis that are inclusive and open to creative innovation. We draw on interviews with participants and in-depth process observation of an iterative knowledge cocreation process in Kenya and Mozambique that brought together scientists, community representatives, government representatives, and practitioners who had expertise or experience in poverty and/or coastal natural resource use and management. We analyze the communicative spaces opened by techniques of system diagrams and future scenarios, and provide a rich account of the emergent process of developing a "shared conceptual repertoire" as a basis for effective communication and knowledge synthesis. Our results highlight the difficulties of challenging dominant narratives and the creative potential that exists in reflecting on their underpinning assumptions. In our analysis, stories and lived experiences emerged as key means shaping the construction of shared concepts and ideas. We conclude by outlining the implications of designing knowledge cocreation processes that support the task of devising systemic interventions that are robust for a range of future scenarios. This includes embracing the role of stories in generating shared meanings and opening up spaces for exploration of knowledge assumptions that are embedded in intervention narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overall, about 20 percent or 8.9 million women in Kenya have unmet family planning needs. The total fertility rate as of 2014 was 3.9 births per woman, which did not meet the Kenya National Population Policy for Sustainable Development target rate of 2.5, a rate that was set to help improve the health of women and entire communities. Working with the staff from Nikumbuke-Health by Motorbike (N-HbM), focus groups and in-depth interviews were conducted in June of 2013 in four rural villages of Southeastern Kenya to elucidate the determinants of reproductive health, including the beliefs and attitudes surrounding family planning, and how these translate into behaviors. The study results indicate that there is high knowledge of contraceptive methods among the women in the communities, but this knowledge does not necessarily translate to behavior or contraceptive use. Application of the Social Ecological Model identifies mediators associated with family planning behavior and suggests areas for interventions to meet the communities' unmet family planning needs at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, and societal levels. This article outlines the specific recommendations given to N-HbM to translate family planning beliefs and attitudes into behaviors, as well as discusses the global importance of designing family planning programs that improve the health of women and their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resource changes observed in rangeland ecosystems have triggered a myriad of ecological, social and economic dynamics, often with adverse implications on pastoral livelihoods. This study applied an integrated approach using local knowledge and spatial technologies to assess the long-term changes in pastoral resources and their implications to pastoral livelihoods in the Amboseli ecosystem in southern Kenya. Reduction in grazing land was perceived by the community to be the main change in pastoral resources that has occurred over the 40-year period. The decline was reported to be more pronounced under sedentary (50 %) and semi-nomadic (47 %) land uses than in the nomadic pastoral land use sites (30 %). This trend was attributed to expansion of cultivation and settlements, which increased by 26 and 17 %, respectively, in sedentary and 17 and 12 %, respectively, in semi-nomadic during the period under study, due to land tenure changes. The use of participatory resource mapping provided an entry point for eliciting community perceptions of problems facing them in order to guide sustainable resource planning and action at a local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine reserves can create both benefits and costs to fishers. This article explores the perceptions of fishers in Kenya and Seychelles about displacement, spillover, and overall impacts of local marine reserves on their livelihoods. We test whether these perceptions are different among fishers from different geographic and socioeconomic conditions. Sixty-six percent of fishers had been displaced from marine reserves or coastal development and 90% believed they had caught fishes that spilled over from marine reserves. Poorer fishers in Kenya were both displaced from, and also felt like they benefited from, marine reserves. This highlights how people's experiences with marine reserves, both positive and negative, are affected by a range of social considerations that may not be incorporated in typical evaluations of ecological and economic marine reserve success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the middlemen–fishermen link in coastal communities along the coast of southern Kenya and Zanzibar, and explores effects of reciprocal agreements and credit arrangements on social-ecological feedbacks of coastal systems. The existence and generality of such arrangements are mapped and their effect on resource use and ecosystem dynamics is then explored. Data show that credit arrangements are widespread and that fishermen are bound by reciprocal agreements and financial guarantees during periods of lower catches that provide short-term stabilizing social effects. These arrangements create incentives which disconnect resource extraction from ecosystem dynamics and impede development of sustainable use practices. The role of middlemen is seldom accounted for in fisheries governance. Scenarios for the development of small-scale fisheries in the region are outlined and the function of middlemen is discussed considering the influence of external drivers. Policies that incorporate middlemen are recommended to improve the governance of fish stocks and coastal ecosystems in East Africa. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]