The water came slowly at first. Then it didn’t stop.
Along the shores of Lake Baringo, families have watched the lake inch closer – past the garden, past the doorstep, past the threshold of homes built to last a lifetime. Some have moved once. Others four or five times, bundling what they can carry and climbing higher ground, half-expecting the waterline to follow. It usually does.
This is not a flood story. Floods recede. This is something else entirely: a lake that has been swallowing the Rift Valley for over a decade, and the communities stranded at its edge, waiting for help that has not come.
A lake that will not stop growing
For most of living memory, Lake Baringo sat at a stable 972 metres above sea level. Then, between 2009 and November 2020, it rose by 9.5 metres and recent measurements show it creeping back toward that historic peak.
The lake has grown by 50%, swelling from around 160 square kilometres to 250 square kilometres in little more than a decade. On flat terrain, that kind of expansion does not stay near the water’s edge. It reaches inland. It reaches into villages.
Leswa. Loruk. Noosukro. Kokwa Island. Kampi Samaki. Sokotei. Kiserian. The list of affected villages reads like a roll call of loss. Schools, hotels, roads – gone. At Soi Safari Lodge, more than 56 rooms have been taken by the lake. At Noosukuro Primary School, the playing field went first. Then the pit latrines. Then the teachers’ quarters. The classrooms hang on. The school is now only reachable by boat.
What disappears with the water
The Il Chamus are an indigenous fisher-pastoralist community whose lives are built around the lake and the land. Every year, flooding tears through their settlements, destroys public buildings, forces families to relocate, deepens food insecurity, and exposes them to water-borne disease.
The fish are harder to find now. Flooded shorelines have pushed water deep into thick vegetation, hiding fish and making fishing increasingly difficult, taking away one of the only reliable sources of income many families have. The grazing land is gone. Invasive plant species move in where the water goes, colonising what little usable land remains. Livestock that sustained entire households for generations have nowhere left to graze.
The people hit hardest are women, youth, and the elderly: the ones with the fewest options, who lose the most when “start over” is the only choice on offer, and who have already started over more than once.
This did not happen by accident
Decades of deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable land use have stripped the catchment bare. Rain that once soaked slowly into the earth now tears down hillsides, dragging silt into the lake, raising its bed, and pushing its waters further and further out.
But the real engine of this crisis is climate change. At Marigat station in Baringo County, average annual rainfall more than doubled after 2010. Across several lake catchments, rainfall increased by up to 30% between 2010 and 2020, and by more than 50% in some areas after 2018.
These communities did not cause this. They are living it anyway.
The threat nobody is talking about
There is something else coming, and it may be worse than anything so far.
Lake Bogoria sits directly south of Lake Baringo. It is rising too. And scientists warn that if it keeps climbing, the two lakes could merge, with catastrophic consequences. Satellite data from December 2025 suggests Bogoria may already have reached its spill point. An overflow could be underway. If it is, alkaline water from Bogoria could flow through wetlands and river systems directly into Lake Baringo, poisoning its freshwater, destroying its fisheries, and wiping out the biodiversity that communities and ecosystems depend on.
For families who have already lost almost everything, losing Baringo’s freshwater would not be a setback. It would be the end.
Where is the accountability?
In 2022, 66 members of the Ilchamus and Tugen communities did something extraordinary. They sued. Their petition, filed against the Baringo County Government and national agencies, argued that the failure to build early warning systems, protect riparian areas, or resettle displaced communities violates the constitutional rights of Kenyan citizens and the country’s own 2016 Climate Change Act, one of the first of its kind on the continent.
The case is still unresolved. The water is still rising.
Some areas around the lake have been permanently underwater for 12 years. Twelve years. That is not a natural disaster waiting to be cleaned up. That is a climate emergency, slow-moving and deliberate, on land that people have called home for generations.
These communities are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for what any government that signed a climate law owes its people: early warnings, resettlement support, flood risk planning, and the basic acknowledgement that their homes, their land, and their lives have value.
The lake keeps growing. The question now is whether the people with the power to act will wait until there is nothing left to save.
Sherie Gakii, Communications and Story Manager
