SAN FRANCISCO, 7 February 2017
For those forced to live through them, droughts are less an unusual event than a way of life that constantly tests your resilience and resourcefulness.
To be a farmer, or make a living from livestock in Ethiopia, where my organisation, Mercy Corps, has been working for many years, you need to be innovative in the face of ever-changing weather patterns.
And yet the 2015 El Niño drought cycle – the worst in 50 years by some measures – tested even this population. One seasoned pastoralist reported recently to our staff that he’d “never seen anything like this drought”.