East Africa drought crisis - 2011 to Now.

East African drought crisis

The region of East Africa has been the ‘primary focus for various drought studies in recent years’ (Haile et al 2019: 146). In the last two decades, East Africa has experienced frequent drought events severe in nature causing crop failure due to low rainfall and human losses.  In Somalia for example, there were around 250,000 deaths during the drought of 2010-11 because of large scale food insecurity and a lack of food supplies and in Kenya, 23 million were affected by drought – ‘the highest number of people reported to have been affected by drought in Africa for over 100 years’ (Rourke 2011: 33).  I want to discuss how drought in the region of East Africa mainly in the countries of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia has created a food and water crisis – it has altered the food landscape significantly as highlighted by the following quote:

“This drought is leaving nothing behind. In previous droughts, we used to lose some animals, but we would always have food and water. But this is different. It is ‘sweeping away’ animals and people.”Abdilal Yaseen, 70 (Oxfam, 2019)

In 2009, the World Food Programme stated that 20 million people required food aid and ten years later in 2019 according to ActionAid an estimated  21.5 million people were facing short shortages and in need of aid.  It is worth considering ‘why the food crisis in eastern and Southern Africa has received so little attention’particularly so as the deaths of thousands of people during the 2010-2011 drought and the long lasting impacts making the following droughts almost unbearable by those affected, could have been avoided if the international community had acted sooner.







   


Causes of Drought
Climate variability is one of the main reasons behind drought in East Africa.  The climate in the region is ‘associated with climate dynamics in the Indian Ocean, the inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) [and] La Nina’ (Haile et al 2019:150). Firstly, the ITCZ influences rainfall patterns as the rainy season coincides with the path of the ITCZ which sweeps across the Horn of Africa two times in a year. Studies have shown that the ITCZ is ‘linked to droughts through a decline of the long rains’ (Haile et al 2019: 150). Drought in East Africa is also closely related to La Nina events which affects the short rains. During the 2010-2011 drought for example, there  was a strong La Nina event which led to a  reduced precipitation in the region during the rainy season between the months of October and December in 2010 and March and May in 2011 ( Dutra et al, 2013).  
A close up of a map Description automatically generated
Figure 1: Horn of Africa: food security and rainfall
The impacts of drought on food water and food security is made worse or rather intensified 
because of its frequent nature. For example, the horn of Africa is currently experiencing a drought because of severe dryness due the failed rains between October-December 2018 and a dry season between January and February 2019 which is highlighted in Figure 1 (Thematic report 2019). The region has yet to recover from the prolonged drought of 2016/2017 and as such, a famine has been declared in some regions in Somalia and Djibouti (Figure 1). It is the pastoralists who are most affected by the drought as it has left thousands of people without their livestock and the ‘more frequent droughts are among it harder for people to recover between shocks’ increasing their vulnerability to the crisis.

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