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The eastern Horn of Africa is experiencing one of the driest October-December (OND) rainy seasons on record, driven by La Niña conditions and a historic strong negative Indian Ocean Dipole. The unfolding drought is severely undermining local agricultural productivity, less than three years after the historic drought that struck the region from late 2020 to early 2023. FEWS NET estimates 20-25 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya are in need of humanitarian food assistance, with drought the main driver for 50-55 percent of those in need. Without a scale-up of food, water, and nutrition assistance, Crisis (IPC Phase 3) and worse outcomes will become increasingly widespread through May (Figure 1). Multiple areas of Somalia face Emergency (IPC Phase 4) outcomes; in these areas, malnutrition is expected to rise, and a large number of people will face outright starvation. While this projection is currently based on prospects for average rainfall during the March to May (MAM) rains, long-range forecasts show considerable uncertainty. If a below-average MAM rainy season materializes in 2026, acute food insecurity outcomes will worsen considerably.
Seasonal rainfall totals are expected to be less than 50 percent of average across most of the region, and some areas will receive less than 30 percent. The region relies on two rainfall seasons: the longer MAM rains and the shorter OND rains, which are both critical for replenishing groundwater and pasture and supporting crop and livestock production. These exceptionally poor OND rains follow erratic rains in MAM 2025 and very high temperatures during the June to September dry season in parts of the Horn. In many areas, the Horn also experienced below-average rainfall during the prior 2024 OND season. The current season’s dry conditions have been compounded by extreme heat that has accelerated the loss of surface water and soil moisture. Many water points are at Near-Dry or Alert status, and vegetation conditions are less than 60 percent of typical levels in the worst-affected areas. In Ethiopia, pasture and browse and water availability are critically low in both wet- and dry-season grazing areas, mainly in Afder, Liban, Dawa, Dollo, Shabelle, and Korahe zones. In Somalia, current rangeland conditions are already worse than those observed during the historic poor 2016/2017 and 2021/2022 OND seasons. Pasture and water availability will further decline across the Horn as the January to February dry season progresses.
Substantial losses are anticipated for the OND rainy season harvests in January-February, which will sharply limit household food availability in cropping and agropastoral livelihood zones and reduce access to food as market supplies tighten regionally and food prices rise. Satellite-derived indicators show widespread and extreme moisture deficits, with crop losses so severe that some seasons effectively failed to start. In Somalia’s Bay and Bakool regions, for example, non-irrigated harvests are projected to reach less than 10 percent of average. In Ethiopia’s agropastoral areas of Somali Region, the typically limited quantities of rainfed crop production collapsed; plantings either did not germinate or withered shortly after emergence due to extreme heat and moisture stress. These losses will not only substantially reduce local food stocks but also reduce poor households’ income from crop sales and agricultural labor. Crop-dependent households in southeast Kenya and northwest Somalia are already facing a third consecutive season of below-average harvests, compounding the current drought’s impacts. At the same time, reduced local supply and atypically high demand are contributing to rapid price increases in markets in key production zones. Maize prices rose 19 percent above the five-year average in Kitui, Kenya, and red sorghum prices rose by 25 percent in Baidoa, Somalia, in November. In Ethiopia, food inflation has remained elevated at 10.9 percent in November.
Rapid declines in pasture and water availability are undermining livestock health and milk production, markedly reducing poor households’ access to food and cash income in pastoral areas. Field reports indicate livestock body conditions are deteriorating quickly, including among typically drought-tolerant camels. Across Addun Pastoral Livelihood Zone, dry-season browse is nearly depleted, leaving livestock to consume plastic and paper refuse in the absence of forage. As resources shrink, pastoralists are migrating livestock earlier and further – across both internal and national borders – than typical, increasing crowding, disease transmission, and the risk of resource-based conflict. Reports from Garissa, Kenya, link outbreaks of sheep and goat pox, Lumpy Skin Disease, and foot-and-mouth disease to livestock movements from neighboring Wajir. Early livestock deaths, including among breeding females, have been reported in Somalia, signaling elevated mortality risk as the January-February dry season progresses. Some households in Somalia’s Addun Pastoral Livelihood Zone have culled offspring to reduce lactation stress on breeding females. Milk production has declined by roughly one-third in areas such as Mandera, Kenya, and many animals have stopped lactating altogether. Poor households are increasingly resorting to distress livestock sales, but rising supply and declining animal saleability are pushing prices downward, diminishing households’ ability to earn sufficient income to buy food and water. Goat prices fell by 7-12 percent in Mandera and Wajir in November, and sharper short-term declines were reported in parts of Somalia in early December. With herd sizes already atypically low following the 2020-2023 drought, rising livestock morbidity and mortality are expected to further diminish remaining herds during the January to February dry season.
These dynamics are resulting in widespread Crisis (IPC Phase 3) outcomes across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, where pastoral and agropastoral systems have had insufficient time to recover from the 2020-2023 drought. Moreover, Emergency (IPC Phase 4) outcomes are expected in the areas of Somalia hit hardest by the current drought, including Addun Pastoral Livelihood Zone**,** Bay/Bakool Low Potential Agropastoral Livelihood Zone**, and neighboring settlements for internally displaced persons (IDPs).** As the dry season progresses, households are expected to increasingly adopt severe and atypical livelihood coping strategies.Pastoralists are increasingly engaged in distress livestock sales to finance both food and water purchases. Reliance on water trucking – now priced up to six times typical levels in Somalia – and the digging of shallow wells in dried riverbeds to access water is rising. Rising fodder and feed-grain prices for livestock are largely unaffordable for poor households, who instead collect dwindling grass and crop residues to sustain animals that are too weak to migrate. As options for sustaining livestock continue to narrow, poor households are increasingly likely to abandon or cull weaker animals to devote limited resources to those most likely to survive. To access cash for food, households are removing children from school, intensifying bush product sales, and relying more heavily on credit, social support, and even begging. Drought-related displacement is increasing and is expected to accelerate during the January-February dry season as rural households migrate to IDP camps and urban centers in search of food and work.
Widening, sustained food consumption gaps are expected to lead to rising levels of acute malnutrition. Households are already adopting consumption-based coping strategies – including reducing meal size and frequency, prioritizing feeding children, and eating wild or less preferred foods – that signal growing risks to nutrition outcomes. Rates of acute malnutrition are already elevated across drought-affected areas. In Somalia, recent SMART surveys (based on weight-for-height z-scores [WHZ]) indicate a global acute malnutrition (GAM) prevalence of 11-19 percent among children under five in central and northern pastoral areas, rising to nearly 25 percent in IDP settlements in Galkacyo and Bossaso. In northern and eastern Kenya, the GAM prevalence ranges from Serious (GAM WHZ 10-14.9 percent) to Critical (GAM WHZ 15-29.9 percent). Acute malnutrition and associated morbidity risks are expected to worsen during the January-February dry season and ahead of the 2026 MAM rains, as dietary gaps widen amid low and declining levels of humanitarian food and nutrition assistance.
Close monitoring of updates to the 2026 MAM seasonal forecast is critical, as these rains will determine whether food security stabilizes or severely worsens. Currently, long-range forecasts are highly uncertain amid the anticipated transition from La Niña to ENSO-neutral conditions between January and June. In analog years, MAM rainfall has ranged from as high as 60 percent above average to as low as 60 percent below average. If the MAM rains perform poorly, the protracted loss of food and cash income and associated reductions in coping capacity would deepen the severity of hunger and raise the likelihood of extreme acute malnutrition levels and hunger-related mortality. Many poor pastoral households would likely slaughter and consume remaining livestock, leaving them with few to no assets with which to purchase food moving forward. At the same time, few agricultural labor opportunities would be available for poor cropping households, who have seen little income for more than a year. Similar seasonal patterns led to extreme acute food insecurity outcomes in 2010/2011, 2016/2017, and 2020-2023, and a shift in the forecast toward a poor MAM season would prompt FEWS NET to assess the risk of whether Famine (IPC Phase 5) would occur.