Jenesia Kathira never thought a patch of ordinary-looking grass would become her lifeline. Yet, on most mornings, she is in the field at dawn with a notebook tucked into the waistband of her faded kanga. She counts seed heads the way other farmers count cobs of maize.  Behind her, a ten-acre pilot plot stretches out.

A year ago, this patch lay bare, swept clean by drought and the hooves of desperate goats.  Today, it is the learning-and-bulking centre of TWENDE, an Ecosystem-Based Adaptation in Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Rangelands.

Jenesia is the group’s secretary, but in these fields she is also time-keeper, quality-controller and the storyteller.  She remembers the dry seasons that left goats too weak to stand and children sent to school on half-empty stomachs.  “Growing grass for seed,” she says, “is the first crop I have ever farmed that does not demand fertiliser or pesticides—only patience.”  

In May, the group of 28 members harvested 480 hay bales and 400 kilogrammes of seed from the ten-acre plot.  Each member also tends a smaller patch at home; those harvests are bulked and sold together.  The ledger in Jenesia’s notebook already shows columns she never imagined keeping, from germination counts, price per kilo, next season’s acreage, to figures that quietly argue against the years when the only numbers that mattered were losses.

African foxtail, the type of grass they farm and also called Buffel grass, forms spreading tufts, grips the soil with wiry roots and survives on as little as 250 mm of rain.  

Hillary Rotich, project manager at JustDigIt, arrives every Tuesday with a scale, a receipt book and the calm certainty of someone who has watched this cycle work before.  “Our job is simple,” he says, “train communities to become seed bankers, then guarantee a market for every kilo they produce.”  The training is practical: how deep to plough, how far apart to drill the rows, how to tell when the seed heads have turned the colour of weak tea but are not yet ready to shatter in the wind.  Once harvested, the seed is dried on tarpaulins, winnowed in the late-afternoon breeze, and stored in sisal sacks until the lorries come.

The Green Climate Fund, a climate-finance mechanism, channels money through the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as the accredited entity.  Over 90 per cent of the total is grant money, meaning the women do not carry debt into the next drought.  The balance is met by county governments in kind—tractors for ploughing, extension officers for advice, and land set aside for communal bulking centres.  Across eleven counties—Garissa, Tana River, Isiolo, Marsabit, Samburu, Kajiado, Kitui, Makueni, Tharaka-Nithi, Meru and Taita-Taveta—22 women’s groups are replicating the model.  

Katarzyna Lesiuk, GCF Country Coordinator for Kenya, describes the project as part of a bigger shift in thinking.  “Instead of waiting for drought emergencies and then trucking in hay, we are investing in the ecosystems themselves so that they can absorb the next shock.”  She ticks off the objectives on her fingers: build county-level capacity for climate-sensitive planning, restore degraded ecosystems, and create ecosystem-based enterprises that keep value in local hands.  Grass seed, she says, is only the beginning; the same cooperatives could later diversify into honey, aloe, or drought-resilient legumes.

Back at Jenesia’s farm, dusk settles with the smell of bruised grass and cooking smoke.  She closes her notebook and walks the rows one last time.  A neighbour who once laughed at “farming weeds” now leans on the fence, asking how much seed he should buy for his quarter-acre.  A county officer with a clipboard wants to know the optimal spacing when it doesn’t rain as expected.

The pick-up finally leaves, tail-lights blinking red in the gathering dark.  Inside it are 400 kilogrammes of seeds. Jenesia stands in the faint swirl of dust, rolling a single foxtail seed between her fingers.  

The next morning, she will open her notebook to a fresh page.  There is still so much ground to cover, but tonight the wind smells of rain and of grass that will not give up.