COVID-19 is a global pandemic that continues to spread worldwide, including Africa, where cases are steadily increasing. The Africa Center for Disease Control leads the pandemic response with the WHO guidelines for critical preparedness, readiness, and reaction. These guidelines lack consideration or nuance for local context and population, with indigenous peoples and pastoralists' unique nature of life, need for mobility, limited access to health and service infrastructure that influence the dynamics of COVID-19.

Human health support often fails to reach indigenous peoples and pastoralists whose inherent mobility and marginalization and limited health infrastructure in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs). Public service delivery amongst pastoralists is limited by ill-suited programs to remote, mobile populations and logistical, organizational, and financial constraints. Turkana Basin is no exception, where mobility is a defining and differential feature of indigenous and pastoralist livelihoods and is also essential to livestock production's present and future viability in drylands. Yet, mobility restrictions have proven to be the most effective measure to control the spread of COVID-19; hence, managing the pandemic amongst indigenous peoples is likely to be particularly challenging. Moreover, the impacts of COVID-19 interventions such as economic disruption due to shutdowns and curfews and constraints on supply chains for goods and services will interact with ongoing compound shocks in the region. COVID-19 and its resultant reactions threaten pastoral livelihoods and food, income, and nutrition security and further create health vulnerabilities.