Horn of Africa floods and drought, 2020-2023 - Forensic analysis

The UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR 2024) report presents 10 case studies, each one with a forensic risk analysis, which systematically examines and investigates the disasters to understand their causes and impacts, as well as the effectiveness of any mitigation measures.

Step 1 - Understanding the disaster DNA

What Happened?

The eastern Horn of Africa is currently experiencing increasingly intense and recurrent cycles of flooding and drought. Across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, the 2020-2022 La Niña event was the most severe in 70 years due to its high intensity and its three-year duration, leading to at least four consecutive failed rainfall seasons. The region experienced extreme rains in 2019-20, followed by widespread and devastating floods, then a drought from 2020 to 2023, and severe flooding in 2023-2024.

Since 2010, the eastern Horn has experienced 8 failed rainy seasons, 5 average seasons, and 3 wet seasons, all linked to predictable oceanic influences such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Western V Gradient (WVG) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Climate change is increasing the frequency of these climate drivers and amplifying their effects, leading to recurrent catastrophic rainfall and record temperatures that severely impact climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, water resources, and health.

Environmental degradation is reducing the region's capacity to withstand extreme weather events, exacerbated by factors such as deforestation and land degradation. For example, in Somalia, moderate environmental degradation impacts 49 percent of the land, while severe degradation affects 30 percent.

Exposure: Where was the damage concentrated?

While climate-driven hazard events trigger shocks, underlying social factors such as deforestation, migration, urbanization patterns, and indebtedness contribute to increased exposure. Over the three-year period from 2020 to 2022, more than 30 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia faced drought-related food insecurity.

The direct impacts of reduced crop and livestock production were worsened by protracted conflict, adverse macroeconomic shocks, and limited coping capacity.

In 2023/24, the worst flood-affected populations were mainly in densely populated urban and riverine areas of Somalia, Kenya and parts of Ethiopia. The effects of the multi-year 2020/23 drought were felt across East Africa, leading to significant food shortages regionally and globally, resulting in high food prices and hyper-inflation.

Urbanization is increasingly associated with the heightened impact of disasters in the region. Population growth in urban and peri-urban settlements often outpaces infrastructure and service development, increasing vulnerability to hazards. For example, in Kenya's Garissa County, 77 per cent of settlements reported the arrival of more than 205,000 people from other areas in search of goods and services to cope with the drought.

Vulnerability: Who was affected and why?

Food insecurity in the Horn of Africa is a complex issue, deeply rooted in the region's pre-existing vulnerabilities such as chronic poverty and limited access to social and economic infrastructure. Poverty rates, defined as income of less than USD 2 per day, range from 16 to 50 percent, driven by both climate and non-climate factors.

Meanwhile, a significant portion of the rural population - 70 percent - is heavily dependent on climate-sensitive agricultural systems. Pastoral and marginal agro-pastoral communities are the most vulnerable. Since 2021, humanitarian appeals have urgently called for $ 2.4 billion to support 8.8 million people affected by drought in the Horn of Africa with monthly life-saving relief.

However, food insecurity is not solely driven by climatic events. Geopolitical factors such as cross-border and international trade bans on food commodities, high fuel and transportation costs, the global COVID-19 pandemic, and hyper-inflation, have all contributed to limiting food access in East Africa. Countries implementing food trade bans to safeguard their own food supplies have inadvertently exacerbated food shortages in regions dependent on imports.

For example, fuel prices have nearly doubled in some parts of East Africa compared to previous years (before 2023), significantly inflating the cost of food distribution. This disruption has been compounded by hyper-inflation, which reached 15.5 percent by the end of 2023.

In some countries, such as Ethiopia, inflationary pressures peaked at an average of 30 to 35 percent. Across the region, as much as one third of average cereal consumption is wheat or wheat products. Some 84 percent of this is imported, largely from Ukraine and Russia. The cost of importing wheat has increased by 33 percent in Kenya.

Vulnerabilities in the region vary due to several compounding factors:

• Weak Social Safety Nets: The lack of social support systems, limited access to education and healthcare, and discrimination exacerbate vulnerability for specific groups.
• Economic Fragility: Poverty, limited access to credit, and dependence on a single industry (tourism) can leave communities with few resources for recovery from shocks.
• Protracted Conflict: Ongoing political or resource-based conflict damages infrastructure, displaces communities, and disrupts access to essential services, further hindering resilience.
• Increased indebtedness: Rising living costs coupled with limited access to financial services can leave communities more exposed to economic shocks caused by extreme weather events.

East Africa has piloted both livestock and crop insurance programs, though their efficacy and impacts are not well documented. However, commercial farmers generally benefit more from such insurance due to the scale of loss in disastrous rainfall seasons. The 2020-23 food crisis was much worse for pastoral communities reliant on livestock than for commercial farmers with diversified income sources. Similarly, crop failures and limited reserves caused much greater hardship for subsistence farmers than for commercial farms with buffer stocks.

The drought had the following country-specific impacts:

• Somalia: The October 2022 drought affected 7.8 million people, equivalent to 46 percent of the country's population.
• Ethiopia: The drought expanded to areas already affected by conflict, including the Afar, Oromia and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' (SNNP) regions. Drought was a factor in the reported increase of child marriages in 2022 (264 percent in Somali, 69 percent in Oromia and 38 percent in SNNP regions). Some 1.4 million children had their education disrupted by migration, school closure or sickness.
• Kenya: An estimated 6.4 million people will require humanitarian assistance in 2023, including about 602,000 refugees, up 35 percent from 2022. This is Kenya's highest recorded number of people in need for at least 10 years. The drought has severely impacted communities' access to water, with nearly 95 percent of water pans drying up in 2022. People now have to trek between 8.6 and 17.6 kilometres to access water, an increase of at least 38 percent above the three-year average, the National Drought Management Agency says.
• Moreover, an estimated 45,000 asylum seekers arrived in Kenya from neighbouring Somalia in 2022, according to UNHCR. In Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, 46 percent of new arrivals interviewed cited the drought as one of the reasons for their flight. In nearby Kakuma, almost 20 per cent of new arrivals cited food insecurity, hunger, and drought as the reasons for flight from their countries of origin.

Resilience: what factors limited the impacts?

Environmental challenges in the Horn of Africa - including extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and unusual rates of plant die-offs - are significant concerns. However, positive developments include the integration of re-greening initiatives and other environmental projects. One notable example is the Great Green Wall Initiative, launched by the European Union, African Union, and others. In Ethiopia alone, the initiative has restored 151,448 hectares of land and trained over 62,759 people in food and energy security.

Advances in long-lead forecasting and scenario development for climate-sensitive hazards are also noteworthy. However, there remains a gap between the development of knowledge and its translation into public awareness and long-term planning.

From a policy perspective, gaps exist between zoning regulations/codes and their effectiveness. Regulations might exist, but their implementation is often hindered by limited understanding at various government levels and weak enforcement. Discussions with regional experts revealed two primary concerns:

• Limited awareness and enforcement: Many stakeholders may not be fully aware of existing policies, or enforcement mechanisms may be weak.
• Focus on short-term solutions: Disaster management strategies often prioritize immediate response over long-term resilience building and risk reduction.

The lack of easily accessible and comprehensive disaster data also hampers long-term planning. Effective data collection and sharing, supported by appropriate legislation, are essential for informed decision-making and mitigating future disasters. In many cases, livestock censuses, crop production statistics, and health-related data are either lacking or outdated.

Countries in the Horn of Africa have diverse levels of early warning and disaster management institutions. Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, have robust multi-agency collaborative teams at both national and sub-national levels. These teams integrate sectoral climate information into their pre- and post-season contingency and response plans. Similar cooperation exists among the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and East African Community (EAC) Member States to build resilience to shocks. However, there is often a weak link between early warning and timely response due to limited funding, lack of decision- and policy-making information or competing priorities for limited national resources and political exigencies.

Research centres in agriculture, water resources, and health have highly skilled human resources at both national and regional levels. However, local funding is insufficient for research into climate adaptation and the rollout of solutions such as drought-resistant seeds. Most leading research centres are internationally funded, serving other commercial interests.

National and local governments are not always able to systematically address risks in their day-to-day policies and plans. Systems are still event-centric, focusing on response to events rather than addressing root causes and vulnerabilities. Effective risk management requires a mix of strategies and policy prescriptions, targeting deficiencies in social policies and environmental sustainability over multiple budget cycles.

Most IGAD and EAC member states have national agencies to manage the environment, but regulation and implementation remain significant challenges, linked to vested political and commercial interests, as well as structural corruption at all levels.

While tools like insurance have value, the vulnerability of pastoralists and marginal mixed-farming agriculturalists will require a combination of both insurance and long-term resilience building. As rainfall declines and temperatures increase, rain-fed agriculture becomes too risky.

The case study indicates that data, early warning, and response capability are available to some degree, but they are weakly connected. While poor, marginalised, and conflict-affected populations lack adequate support or resources, a meaningful target would be to use regional data and research skills to improve warning systems and readiness for timely responses. This process should also aim to involve all forms of knowledge, including satellite observations interpretated for the Horn's context, together with pastoralist reports on the health of their animals. These targets would contribute to avoiding drought and famine disasters.

Step 2: Future trends

People

• Rapid population growth means that the EAC population is expected to pass 400 million people by 2040.
• Internal migration, especially from rural to urban areas, continues to rise.
• Chronic food insecurity, currently affecting 10 percent of the population is projected to worsen, potentially affecting over 40 million people within the next 20 years.
• Youth unemployment rates have remained very high across the continent. In 2022, approximately 12.7 percent of African youth were unemployed, a figure mirrored in the East and Horn of Africa region, according to the International Labour Organization. Government officials report that each year an average 800,000 young people enter the workforce in search of employment. However, economies in the region are struggling to create enough jobs. Conflict, political instability, drought, and other factors contribute to limit labour and work opportunities. In addition, young women often face gender discrimination, where employers show a striking bias towards hiring young men over young women.
• Tens of millions of Africans are expected to migrate in response to water stress, reduced crop productivity and sea level rise associated with climate change. In East Africa, the number of climate-related internal migrants (moving within countries) is projected to reach more than 10 million by 2050 for a 2.5°C global warming scenario.

Planet

• Drought: Since 2005, the frequence of droughts has doubled, occurring once every three years instead of once every six years. Droughts have also become more severe in the long and summer rainfall seasons than in the short rainfall season. Several prolonged droughts have occurred, predominantly in arid and semi-arid regions over the past three decades.
• Extreme rainfall and flooding: East Africa has experienced significant rainfall variability and intense wet spells. Widespread flooding events have affected most countries, including Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania.
• Water Disruptions: Disruptions in water availability, such as during droughts or infrastructure breakdown, jeopardise access to safe water and adequate sanitation, undermine hygiene practices and contaminate the environment with toxins. Cholera outbreaks are anticipated to severely impact East Africa during and particularly after El Niño-Southern Oscillation events.
• Future Warming: Warming temperatures are expected to negatively affect food systems in Africa by shortening growing seasons and increasing water stress.

Prosperity

• Since 90 percent of the region's farmers depend on rainfed agriculture, any disruption in rainfall rates will have severe consequences for food production and livelihoods.
• While global inflation is expected to decrease 4.4 percent by 2025, high inflation rates in services and transportation at 5 percent, combined with heavy reliance on grain imports, expose these nations to global price spikes and supply chain disruptions. This may impact food affordability and availability.
• Youth unemployment, which is currently high, is expected to increase further, exacerbating socio-economic challenges.

African governments face growing debt problems. Some economies have had to allocate 70 percent of the national budget for debt repayments.

Step 3: Forensic learning

This section aims to encourage dialogue around the forensic analysis to foster improved decision making. The areas for consideration below are envisaged as an input to stimulate in-country discussion and action plan on future disaster prevention and enhanced disaster risk management.