Practical Ways to Address Droughts in the Horn of Africa: Moving Beyond Reactive Interventions

Climate change exacerbates the chronic challenges of food insecurity, poverty and environmental degradation. We need an integrated approach that views the problem and socio-economic development as mutually dependent to fight it.

An insightful African proverb reminds us that “wood already touched by fire is not hard to set alight”. East Africa and the Horn of Africa are now facing the 3rd consecutive drought since 2020 occasioned by La Ni?a conditions. So, we are seeing compounding effects, including those of the locust crisis that was the worst outbreak in 70 years and caused up to $8billion in lost food. As many as 20million people in the four countries of the horn of Africa are at severe risk and facing severe food shortages.

In this region where livestock and agriculture are the mainstays, 1.5million head of cattle have died . At a reserved price of $200 per head, communities have lost more than $300million of their capital by February 2022. This is in addition to a 58 – 70% fall in cereal production. Food prices have also skyrocketed, with harvests as low as 70% below normal levels. Therefore, the situation is very dire, and these droughts have the general effect of reversing the socio-economic gains of the people of this region.

? What impact climate change has on the current drought situation?

The current drought is attributed to La Ni?a conditions, an extreme climate effect that has been on since 2020. Under the changing climate, the intensity and frequency of these extreme events are projected to increase. The science from the latest IPCC 6th assessment report recorded that the globe is set to breach the safe 1.5°C warming within a decade; this only implies increased frequency of droughts and growth of hyper-arid and arid areas like the HOA exceeding 3% and heading towards 10%. Meaning more fierce droughts lie ahead. Already in some countries in the Horn of Africa (HOA), the famine frequency has been increasing?- from one famine in 20 years between the 60s – 80s to a famine in 12 years in the early 80s to mid-90s, then a famine every two years going into the 2000s, to then a famine almost every year from the mid-2000s going into 2010s and up to the present times.

So, climate change will continue to exacerbate these dire effects, especially now considering that the globe is on track to breach the safe 1.5°C warming in just 2 decades and with Africa warming faster than the rest f the globe means this safe limit will be breached much quicker for the region.?????

How to deal with droughts and contain them and help the people of the affected nations

What is needed is an entire paradigm shift in the approach of addressing these droughts. We urgently need to move away from the knee-jack approach to embrace a longer-term approach that builds the resilience of communities from the ground. And for this, the answer is in one – “socioeconomics”. While climate change is global, the poor are always disproportionately vulnerable because they lack the resources to afford alternatives to buffer themselves when disasters strike. To contextualize this with an example, it is reported that in Louisiana, a high-risk area prone to extreme climate events such as hurricanes that are set to escalate with the changing climate, home & business owners filed up to $10billion in insurance claims for damage caused by hurricanes and tropical storms in 2020.

In contrast, when the HOA suffered the worst locust outbreak in 70 years, which caused up to $8billion in food loss, there is no talk of insurance compensation among the most vulnerable smallholder farmers. Therefore, the point is that the core of long-term resilience-building is socioeconomics. If communities are empowered socioeconomically, they stand a better chance of buffering themselves against the losses and vulnerabilities caused by droughts. This must be weaved into the livelihoods of these communities, and how climate action can be a provider of practical solutions to this end calls for the following:

First, a paradigm shift in the narrative of climate action must be fostered, where we divest from projecting liability to projecting investment opportunities. And this will work best if we embrace what I call “Mitigation powering Adaptation”. Across Africa, including in the HOA, most country climate commitments popularly called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) front clean energy and agriculture as the leading priorities. Clean energy is the leading mitigation priority, while sustainable agriculture is the leading adaptation priority. What is needed is a narrative change that premises actions in these areas as socially driven where returns are measured as social impact, to financial investment-driven – where returns are measured in financial dividends.

To give an example, communities have lost over $300million in livestock wasting due to the drought so far. Decentralizing solar dryers as a mitigation action to enable these communities to prepare and dry the meat from their animals before they die off means generating incomes while mitigating against emissions that compound climate change. There is Zai, an adaptation technique that has proven capable of increasing yields up to 500%. But ensuring that clean energy is made available to process, these yields will turn them into incomes. Solar dryers have been shown to increase the shelf-life of crop yields and, by this, enhance market opportunities and increase earnings by up to 30times. The HOA needs to make this narrative the norm at all levels of decision-making to have communities embrace these climate action solutions as investments that will enhance their financial bottom-line. Not social actions for consumption.

The second is Leveraging Local communal institutions as conduits to mobilize investments for solutions. We need to ask ourselves how HOA communities can access saving and investment financial systems that are most accessible to them. Accordingly, local communal cooperatives need to be activated among communities in this region through targeted incentives such as awareness-raising and other market incentives such as buying of products strictly through cooperatives. Through such structures, any income generated gets invested and pooled to enable communities to afford better higher-order value addition solutions they need to drive their livelihoods. The solar dryers I mentioned earlier are an example.

?Third, local private-public partnerships (PPPs) to drive value-added solutions. Infrastructure for value addition such as solar dryers, solar irrigation, water harvesting etc., are critical to unlocking livelihood opportunities in the HOA. Such dry areas are capital expenditures that are out of reach of communities. But governments working with communities in local PPP can generate symbiotic collaborations where governments make capital investments in this shared infrastructure, and communities saving and investing through cooperatives take charge of such infrastructure’s operational and maintenance cost. For example, an abattoir set up by the government to enable meat processing for communities who then re-invest monies through the cooperatives to operate and maintain the abattoir will go a long way to ensure community ownership of such solutions. The same logic applies to community solar dryers, where giant dryers can be set up to enable shared preservation services, solar cold storage or solar-powered irrigation and water harvesting. The point is generating this symbiosis between government as providers of large scale shared value addition infrastructure and communities who run and maintain this infrastructure through their earnings from value addition.

?

Fourth is leveraging local governance structures for accountability and traceability of progress. What can’t be measured can’t be done. Across Africa, the accountability and traceability of development actions continue to linger. But local governance structures trusted by communities and which command the respect of locals can go a long way in tracing the impact of interventions. Ensuring interventions are delivered through local cooperatives and supervised by local governance structures will go a long way in accounting for and evaluating effect at the local level and making targeted interventions to prioritize what works.

Fifth data for policy. Data of what has proven to work at the ground level is very critical towards informing targeted policy to ensure incentives are targeted at actions and actors that have proven most impactful. This active feedback loop of what has been empirically proven to work on the ground in establishing the long term resilience of communities in the HOA is critical to ensure incentives are targeted at upscaling proven success stories.

?