The worst drought that the Horn of Africa has seen in decades is threatening millions with hunger and quickly turning into a dire humanitarian crisis. Already this year, 500,000 people in Somalia have been displaced, and about 90 percent of the country’s land is under drought conditions. The displacement could reach 1.4 million within the next few months.

New rains should be arriving this month, but forecasts suggest a continued dry period. As the situation stands, as many as 6 million people are on the brink of famine. In recent weeks, analysts have evoked the memory of Somalia’s 2011 famine, when 260,000 people died, about half of them children under age 6.

The drought is also affecting neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Across the region, at least 29 million people are at high levels of food insecurity. 

While famines are thankfully much rarer now than they were during parts of the 20th century, their full effects are unclear. Batul Sadliwala and Alex de Waal previously examined the connections between famine and migration for the Migration Information Source, noting that despite significant research, it remains unclear whether migration precedes or follows famine and whether it mitigates or worsens starvation.

Conditions in the Horn are expected to be aggravated by the war in Ukraine, which has dramatically escalated the costs of food and other staple goods such as cooking oil. At the same time, the overwhelming international attention on Ukraine has allowed other crises to fade from public attention and receive scant donor money (humanitarian efforts in Somalia have received a paltry 4 percent of needed funding for the year). The episode shows how global crises can be interdependent, even if the linkages are not immediately visible.

Yet while humanitarian crisis linked to climate events such as drought can force many from their homes, migration can also be a strategy to build resilience against uncertain environmental conditions. In the Source, Patrick Sakdapolrak and Harald Sterly previously examined this process in Thailand. Some members of the Somali diaspora have provided crucial assistance to their ancestral home.

In the future, movement throughout East Africa might be slightly easier, thanks to new regional efforts aimed at closer cooperation on migration and shared protections for migrants. Slightly more than half of all African migrants stay elsewhere on the continent, and many East Africans can move easily within the region due to integration efforts, as Samuel Okunade explained in a Source article last year. But uneven access to worker and other protections can reduce the benefits of this movement.

Most of the people displaced by the current drought have moved internally. But the international dimensions of the crisis point to the growing importance of solutions that extend beyond borders, whether it is the ability of a migrant worker to easily send back remittances or responses to lessen the shock of food prices sent soaring by events in far-flung breadbaskets.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]