Who we are

Strategic Approaches Towards Community Development (SATCD) is a locally rooted, community-based organisation operating in Samburu County, Northern Kenya — one of the most climate-vulnerable and structurally underserved regions in the country.

Established and legally registered in 2019, SATCD was founded in response to the persistent cycle of drought, humanitarian crisis, and structural poverty affecting pastoral and agro-pastoral communities. The organisation emerged with a clear mandate: to move communities from recurrent crisis response to anticipatory, resilient, and self-sustaining systems of development.

Unlike traditional project-based interventions, SATCD positions itself as a community resilience systems actor, integrating humanitarian response with long-term development through forecast-based programming, early warning systems, and locally driven adaptation strategies. This approach enables communities not only to respond to shocks but to anticipate and reduce their impacts before they occur.

At the core of SATCD’s work is the belief that sustainable change is only possible when communities are empowered as the primary designers and implementers of their own development pathways. The organisation therefore applies a deeply participatory and locally led model, ensuring that community knowledge, priorities, and lived realities shape all interventions.

SATCD’s programming focuses on strengthening the interconnected systems that determine community well-being, including climate resilience, livelihood stability, human capital development, and local governance structures. By addressing these systems holistically, SATCD works to dismantle the root causes of multidimensional poverty rather than treating its symptoms.

The organisation employs a combination of needs-based, problem-solving, asset-based, participatory, rights-based, and welfare approaches, ensuring that interventions are both context-sensitive and inclusive. This integrated methodology enables SATCD to operate effectively at the intersection of humanitarian response, development programming, and resilience building.

Through its work, SATCD seeks to reposition vulnerable communities from passive recipients of aid to active agents of resilience and transformation, capable of managing risks, adapting to change, and improving their long-term livelihoods.