Straddling across the crossroads of the three nation-states along the borderlands of Ethiopia-Kenya and South Sudan, the Nyangatom are a Nilotic language speaking small agro-pastoral have over the past three decades been exposed to a wide range of uncertainties. In addition to government induced large-scale development intervention and the ensuing displacement from their land and restriction of their mobility in search of grazing pasture, climate change often expressed in terms of irregular rainfall, the decline in the size of River Omo and the gradual shrinking of flood retreat cultivation have put enormous pressure on them on their livelihood and their very survival. How did the Nyangatom cope with these challenges in the face of the global spread of COVID-19? This paper strives to address the complexity these challenges, the ways in which they shape the lives of people, and the coping mechanism adopted by the Nyangatom over the course of time by using an ethnographic approach as a method of research. The required data for the paper has been collected through an extended fieldwork. In addition to an ongoing fieldwork in Nyangatom district, date has been collected for over the past one decade as part of a PhD dissertation completed in 2016.
