ASAL: The story of Start -Up Nations

By Shadrack Agaki

As Kenya marked Madaraka Day 2026 under the theme “Education, Skills and the Future,” the choice of Wajir County as the national host is both symbolic and strategic. It signals a growing recognition that Kenya’s frontier regions are central to the country’s future resilience and transformation.

For decades, Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands, which cover approximately 80 per cent of the country’s landmass, remained on the margins of national development due to limited infrastructure, climate vulnerability, insecurity, and low access to education.

Yet global experience shows that regions once viewed as disadvantaged can become centres of innovation and economic resilience when nations deliberately invest in human capability, skills, and knowledge systems.

The story captured in Start-Up Nation offers important lesson. Israel transformed ecological hardship into opportunity through sustained investment in education, technical skills, research, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Rather than viewing scarcity as a permanent limitation, it turned necessity into a driver of resilience.

Kenya’s Northern Frontier holds similar possibilities if infrastructure development is matched with deliberate investment in skills and capability development.

The sustainable transformation of ASAL regions will not be achieved through roads, boreholes, electricity, and digital infrastructure alone. It will also depend on whether such investments empower local communities with relevant competencies and opportunities.

Infrastructure without skills risks underutilisation; infrastructure combined with capability development creates thriving ecosystems of production, enterprise, innovation, and resilience.

This is why the Madaraka Day theme is timely. Education and skills are major social and developmental concerns. They are central to economic competitiveness, climate adaptation, food security, peace-building, and national stability.

Kenya’s ongoing reforms in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector therefore deserve greater national attention.

The introduction of Competency-Based Education and Training represents a signiicant policy shift from theoretical instruction towards practical capability development.

Increasingly, the country is recognising that human capital is measured not only through certiicates, but through the ability of citizens to solve problems, adapt to change, and contribute productively to society.

This renewed focus has repositioned TVET from being viewed as an alternative pathway to becoming a strategic pillar for national transformation. Kenya requires climate-smart agricultural technicians, renewable energy specialists, water harvesting experts, livestock value-chain professionals, digital innovators, healthcare technicians, and construction artisans.

These are the skills capable of unlocking the economic potential of frontier counties while strengthening national resilience.

Importantly, this transformation requires moving beyond generalised training towards ecosystem-driven capability development rooted in local realities. Northern Kenya, for example, requires specialised competencies in livestock production, veterinary services, leather processing, climate adaptation, and water resource management.

Skills development must increasingly relect the comparative advantages of diferent ecological and economic zones. The development of irst-mile infrastructure in frontier regions must be accompanied by long-term ecosystem thinking.

A borehole, for instance, should not merely provide domestic water; it should support irrigation, agribusiness, livestock productivity, food processing, technical training, and youth enterprise development.

Such thinking transforms infrastructure into an economic multiplier capable of driving sustainable transformation. Indeed, Kenya’s future will not only be built in major cities and corporate boardrooms.

It will also emerge from workshops, innovation hubs, farms, training institutions, and enterprises across the Northern Frontier. But this transformation will ultimately depend on one critical investment: investing in people.

Because nations do not become resilient by accident; they become resilient when they deliberately develop the capabilities of their citizens.

The writer is a UN global food systems youth leader, vocational and technical trainer, and communication consultant