Aaron Nanaok
Kenyan agronomist Aaron Nanok has turned Turkana’s parched rangelands into living test beds for climate-smart farming. Armed with a bachelor’s in natural resource management from Egerton University and a master’s in food security and community nutrition from Gulu University, he now heads the county’s Agri-Nutrition Unit, where he grafts drip-irrigation kits, drought-tolerant sorghum and mobile soil-testing labs onto the traditional pastoral economy. Since 2019 his team has coached more than 200 drought-stricken households to shift from relief dependence to surplus production, supplying local schools with vitamin-rich vegetables and boosting family incomes by up to 40 percent.
Nanok’s data-driven field trials—run in partnership with FAO and Kenyan research institutes, have become regional blueprints for scaling climate-smart agriculture, earning him the UN Person of the Year award in 2022. He backs innovation with policy muscle, drafting county bylaws that reward water-harvesting cooperatives and fast-track women-led farmer groups into public-procurement markets. Next on his agenda: a solar-powered cold-chain hub to cut post-harvest losses and an agri-tech fellowship that pairs Turkana youth with start-ups tackling arid-land nutrition. For Nanok, every successful harvest is proof that resilience can be cultivated, even where the soil once seemed to hold little more than dust and hope.