People living in North Eastern who entirely depend on traditional family planning methods might go for months without these services.
This is due to a long drought and high temperatures which have decimated trees used in producing various family planning herbal concoctions for generations.
According to Qali Hassan, a traditional healer, managing a herbal bank in Dadajibula village climate change related impacts ravaging semi-arid Northern Kenya have affected traditional family planning methods for thousands of households.
“Village herbal banks where we store herbal medicines are experiencing dwindling stocks and are being scrambled for by thousands of pastoralists from remote villages along the Kenya-Somalia border,” she said.
She said that in March she received an estimated 1,000 customers from other villages and towns looking for supplies but she did not have enough due to high demand and low supplies.
“Family planning services here in Dadajibula are over-stretched and our supplies can only last for the next one month when we will be forced to shut the ‘bank’ and pray for divine intervention,” said Hassan.
Hassan added that the affected customers are now resorting to birth spacing through prolonged breastfeeding and abstinence from regular sexual intercourse.
“We expect the El-Nino rains to change things so that we get flowers and leaves to produce some concoctions and monthly herbal pills but we only experienced erratic showers and flash floods from the Ethiopian highlands which swept the border villages.”
Halima Adow, a customer from the remote Saretho village in Dadaab, said she has run out of her herbal family planning concoctions forcing her to sell her two emaciated goats to buy supplies from the distant Dadajibula herbal banks but supplies might run out soon.
“I have used these traditional methods for 20 years now and they are good. They are made from known trees. What is available in hospitals is not supported by my Islamic religion,” Adow said.