TURKANA – By the time the first fishing boats glide back to Impresa Beach, the Turkana sun is already beginning to bite.
Women hurry to spread fresh tilapia on smoking racks. Others carefully turn fillets over charcoal fires, racing against a heat that can erase a day’s income before noon. Traders move from boat to boat inspecting the night’s catch, while children weave between wooden canoes dragged onto the sand after hours on the lake.
It is another ordinary morning on the shores of Lake Turkana.
For Stephen Ekuwom, however, the beach has been quietly changing.
He has watched more people arrive every year, not tourists, but people searching for another way to survive. Former pastoralists who lost entire herds to relentless drought now mend fishing nets. Young men who once followed cattle into the rangelands now spend nights on the lake. Families walk in from villages where the pasture has disappeared, hoping the water can provide what the land no longer can.
“More people are coming to fish every day,” Stephen says, watching another canoe scrape onto the shore. “They are coming from everywhere.”
Fishing has become Turkana’s employer of last resort.
Yet it is also home to one of Kenya’s greatest economic paradoxes.
Last year, President William Ruto sparked debate after remarking that fish in Lake Turkana “grow old and die while people go hungry.” The comment spread quickly across social media, becoming a joke, a meme and another political talking point. Many dismissed it as an exaggeration.
But behind the awkward wording lay an uncomfortable truth.
Long before the President repeated those words, fisheries experts studying Lake Turkana had reached almost the same conclusion. A regional fisheries assessment under the Indian Ocean Commission’s ECOFISH programme warned that the lake’s greatest problem was not a shortage of fish but the inability to move them efficiently to consumers. Lake Turkana can sustainably produce more than 30,000 metric tonnes of fish every year, yet annual catches fluctuate between 5,000 and 15,000 metric tonnes. In some years, Kenya harvests barely one-sixth of what the lake can sustainably provide.
The problem has never been the fish.
The problem begins the moment they leave the water.
Without enough cold storage, ice plants, processing facilities and reliable transport, fish spoil before reaching distant markets. Some are smoked to extend their shelf life, but even then, quality declines before buyers can collect them. Others never make it beyond the beaches where they are landed.
Standing at Impresa Beach, the contradiction is impossible to ignore. Every delayed journey chips away at the value of the catch. Every spoiled crate represents money lost by fishermen, traders and families who depend on the lake.
Ironically, demand has never been the problem.
Buyers already travel to Kalokol from Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Fish from Impresa regularly finds its way to Kitale and Nairobi despite poor infrastructure. Regional markets are hungry for affordable protein. The fish are there. The buyers are there.
What is missing is the connection between them.
That is where the proposed Lake Turkana ferry enters the story.
At first glance, it looks like a transport project. In reality, it could become the missing link in a much larger economic corridor stretching from the shores of Lake Turkana through Marsabit to Moyale and into Ethiopia.
Today, traders transporting fish between Kalokol and Loiyangalani often face a long, expensive journey around the lake. A ferry would dramatically reduce that travel time, allowing fresh fish to reach markets more quickly and at lower cost. Combined with investment in cold storage and processing, it could significantly reduce post-harvest losses that currently eat away at fishermen’s earnings.
But the ferry is only the beginning.
Beyond Loiyangalani lies Marsabit and, further north, Moyale, Kenya’s busiest gateway into Ethiopia. Plans for a dry port there could transform the region into a logistics hub linking northern Kenya with one of Africa’s largest consumer markets.
Instead of ending at the lakeshore, fish harvested before dawn at Impresa or Kalokol could travel across the lake, through Marsabit and into Ethiopia, where demand for affordable protein continues to grow. Livestock traders could move animals more efficiently across the border. Farmers could reach new buyers. Even artisanal gold from Lomeguro and Naduat could enter more formal supply chains through improved transport and customs facilities.
For decades, these have been separate economies: Fishing, Livestock, Gold mining.
Each rich in potential but isolated by poor infrastructure.
Together, they tell a different story.
Two hundred kilometres west of the lake, miners descend hand-dug shafts searching for gold hidden beneath the hills of Lomeguro and Nameyana. Along the Kenya-Ethiopia border, livestock worth millions of shillings crosses every year, much of it through informal trade. On the shores of Lake Turkana, thousands depend on fishing even as much of the lake’s potential remains untapped.
The challenge facing all three industries is remarkably similar.
Producing wealth is one thing.
Moving it efficiently to markets is another.
That is why many development planners increasingly view the Lake Turkana ferry and the Moyale dry port as complementary investments rather than separate projects. One connects communities across the lake. The other connects northern Kenya to regional and international markets.
Together, they could begin rewriting the economic story of Kenya’s north.
History, however, urges caution.
Northern Kenya has heard promises of transformation before. Oil discoveries in Turkana were expected to usher in prosperity, yet many communities closest to the wells still struggle with poor roads, unreliable electricity and limited economic opportunities. Infrastructure alone does not create development. It must be matched by investment in cold storage, fish processing, roads, financing and policies that ensure local communities benefit from the wealth generated around them.
Back at Impresa Beach, Stephen Ekuwom watches fishermen unload another night’s catch.
The lake before him has never lacked abundance. Its waters hold one of Africa’s richest inland fisheries. Its hills conceal gold. Its rangelands sustain millions of shillings worth of livestock.
For generations, the challenge has never been finding wealth.
It has been finding a way to move it.
Perhaps that is why the story of Lake Turkana is no longer simply about fish.
It is about whether a ferry, a dry port and a corridor through Marsabit can finally connect one of Kenya’s richest but most isolated regions to the markets waiting beyond its horizonand in doing so, ensure that the wealth of the lake no longer grows old before it reaches the people who need it most.
