Tahira Mohammed graduated from the University of Sussex in Brighton with a PhD. She is one of Kenya’s youngest PhD holders.

Her journey to the highest academic degree has been action-packed, through hills and valleys.

Tahira hails from Moyale in Marsabit County. She is the fifth child in a family of two boys and three girls. From a young age, her father has been mentally ill. Tahira’s mother had to step in as the family’s breadwinner.

Tahira, a mother of three, would work alongside her mother to ensure that the family never lacked any basic needs.

“As a young girl, I would come home from school and help my mum sell incense, which she was making at home so that we could get something for food,” she says.

“Once women from Northern Kenya get married, they usually have to choose something to do around their area. I’m also a mother of three, so combining that with pursuing my studies as a woman from that area was not easy but I managed,” she said.

After completing her KCPE, Tahira considered repeating Class 8 as her family wasn’t in the financial capacity to send her to a secondary school. Fortunately, she secured bursary funding and enrolled at Moyale Girls Secondary School.

She studied there up to form 2 when the bursaries became insufficient to fund her school studies. Tahira Mohammed dropped out of school for a year until her elder sister came to the rescue.

Her elder sister at University used her HELB loan funding to ensure that she continued with her education. She took Tahira to Trikha Girls Secondary School in Thika, where she completed her secondary studies.

Tahira scored a B+ in KCSE, gaining admission to the University of Nairobi to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology. Eventually, she topped her class in university and graduated with first-class honors and a GPA of 74.0 in 2016.

The UoN awarded her a full scholarship to pursue a Master of Art in International Studies, at its Institute of Diplomacy and International Studies. She successfully completed her master’s, with a case-sensitive project on human smuggling across the Kenya-Ethiopia border.

“The Anthropological Research Foundation has helped me do my research because human smuggling is a very sensitive area. I had to cross the borders, I had to get to police stations, I had to find the smuggled people, the brokers and do the very sensitive interviews,” she said.

After completing her Master, Tahira joined the University of Sussex for a doctorate. She did her project research at the University’s Institute of Development Studies.

Tahira says her project teaches pastoralists how to manage different vices like drought, animal disease and conflict. Her thesis was on ‘The role of the moral economy in response to uncertainty among the pastoralists of Northern Kenya’.

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“My project was based in Isiolo. I was studying how pastoralists in Isiolo have gone through different forms of crises like drought, animal disease, and conflict for the past 45 years, from 1975 to 2020. I looked at what activities they were doing and specifically what social relationships, solidarities, moral economies, have helped,” she says.

Three years later, Tahira Mohammed graduated from the University of Sussex with a PhD.

In the future, Tahira looks forward to augmenting her project to help her community. She also seeks to understand how local networks should be combined with external support like humanitarian aid.

“I will continue studying and researching because most of the time the projects which are implemented in these pastoral areas are designed from the outside and don’t consider local perspectives,” Tahira stated.

“I studied these local perspectives for my Ph.D. and I want to combine what they have been doing for the last 45 years with intervention so that we can understand where we have gone wrong,” she adds.