By Ahmed Shakur – RACIDA Communications Officer: –
As El Niño draws closer, communities across one of Africa’s most climate-vulnerable regions face another damaging season. The question is no longer whether we can predict the rains, but whether we will act before they arrive.
Across the drylands of the Horn of Africa, life follows an increasingly painful cycle. Rains fail, pasture disappears, livestock weaken, water sources dry up, food prices rise and families sell the few productive assets they have left. Communities begin rebuilding, but recovery is often interrupted when the rains return too heavily and too quickly. Rivers rise, roads disappear beneath floodwater, farms are submerged, water sources are contaminated, homes collapse, markets are disrupted and families that had only just begun to recover are displaced again.
This is the reality facing communities across the Greater Horn of Africa: a region caught between extremes, where drought can be followed by destructive flooding, and where one crisis arrives before households, institutions and infrastructure have recovered from the last. [2] The 2026 El Niño outlook has therefore drawn renewed attention to the risk of a wetter-than-normal October–December season.
For communities already weakened by drought, floods, displacement, food insecurity and livelihood loThe region has already shown what happens when extreme weather collides with accumulated vulnerability. Across Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, successive shocks have depleted livestock, weakened agriculture, displaced populations, raised food prices, strained health systems and damaged roads, water systems, schools, farms and homes. This is not a series of isolated emergencies but a cycle in which drought reduces household assets, floods destroy what remains, emergency assistance helps families survive, recovery begins and another shock arrives too soon. Over time, repeated disasters quietly erode the ability to recover.
The 2023 floods remain one of the clearest reminders of this fragility. They followed one of the most severe drought episodes in decades, especially in Somalia, where years of drought, food insecurity and displacement had already weakened communities. By December 2023, approximately 2.48 million people in Somalia had been affected by flooding, around 1.2 million had been displaced and at least 118 people had died.[3] Homes were destroyed, roads and bridges damaged, farmland inundated, water systems contaminated, markets disrupted and disease risks increased. The flooding was not only a water emergency; it also became a food-security, health, WASH, protection, education and livelihoods crisis.
This interconnectedness is especially visible in the Kenya–Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands, particularly around Mandera and the Dawa River basin. Although often described as the Mandera Triangle, the area is in practice a connected landscape where families, pastoralists, livestock, traders and markets move across national boundaries; rivers and drainage systems cross administrative borders; and communities on one side may depend on water, grazing, markets or transport routes on the other. A climate shock in one place can therefore produce consequences far beyond where it begins.
The Dawa River is not simply a line on a map. It is part of a shared ecological and livelihood system that provides water, supports agriculture and livestock, and sustains economic activity along its banks and wider catchment. Yet when rainfall upstream becomes intense, the same river can become a source of sudden and destructive flooding.
Rain may fall in one country and create flood risk in another; information may be generated upstream while consequences are felt downstream; and communities often need cross-border information to act in time.
Previous flooding in the wider Mandera area has damaged homes, farms, roads and water infrastructure. In 2020, county authorities reported that floods affected more than 7,500 households, destroyed approximately 5,146 acres of cultivated land and flooded more than 4,600 farms. [1] Nineteen water intake points were also affected, disrupting water access for an estimated 72,200 households. [1] Behind these figures are families losing food, income, livestock, shelter or productive assets, and communities facing disrupted services, longer journeys for safe water and greater dependence on emergency support.
El Niño should therefore not be seen simply as a weather event. It is a risk multiplier. The problem is not rainfall alone, but rainfall meeting exposure and vulnerability. In a prepared community, strong rains can replenish water, restore pasture and strengthen food security. In a community with weak drainage, fragile infrastructure, poor sanitation and limited coping capacity, the same rainfall can become a disaster. The difference is preparedness.
Early warnings must become more practical and action-oriented. Forecasts, climate outlooks, satellite monitoring and river gauges are essential, but they do not save lives unless they trigger decisions. For flood-prone communities along the Dawa, an effective warning system would monitor upstream rainfall and river levels, interpret the data, activate agreed risk thresholds and send clear messages to county authorities, local leaders, volunteers, health facilities and humanitarian partners. Communities should already know what each warning means: when to prepare, move livestock, evacuate vulnerable households and activate response plans.
The resources for those actions should be ready before the crisis. Financing, transport, safe areas, water-treatment supplies and health preparations must be identified in advance. In a cross-border landscape, this requires institutions and countries to communicate and act together, because a river does not wait for a government meeting, a flood does not respect a county boundary and disease risks do not stop at borders.
The same principle applies to infrastructure and livelihoods. Roads, bridges, water points, health facilities, schools, farms and settlements should be designed around future risk, not repeatedly rebuilt to the same vulnerable standard. For pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, livestock are savings, food, income, social capital and insurance against future shocks. Early livestock movement, fodder, veterinary services, safe grazing areas and functioning markets can protect household wealth before floodwaters arrive. For farmers, preparedness must protect crops, irrigation systems, seeds, tools and food stores so that productive capacity is not lost.
This is where humanitarian action, development and climate adaptation must meet. Communities need emergency assistance when disaster strikes, but they also need resilient infrastructure between disasters and the ability to anticipate the next shock before it arrives. Water shows this clearly. In dryland areas, flooding can create too much water and too little safe water at the same time. WASH preparedness should therefore be built into flood planning through pre-positioned water-treatment supplies, mapped water sources, water-quality monitoring, emergency sanitation, outbreak readiness and practical household guidance.
Preparedness must also centre people. Women, children, older people, persons with disabilities and displaced households may face additional barriers during evacuation, access to warnings and safe shelter. Community knowledge is equally important. Local residents often know where floodwater reaches first, which roads become impassable and which households need assistance. Scientific forecasting and community knowledge should reinforce each other so early warning becomes useful, trusted and actionable.
Local organizations and community structures should therefore be involved across the full risk-management cycle: understanding risk, planning preparedness, designing triggers, implementing early action, responding to emergencies, supporting recovery and learning from what happened. This requires sustained investment. Short-term emergency grants save lives, but early-warning networks, community disaster committees, flood-resilient infrastructure, livelihood diversification and climate adaptation require continuity and multi-year financing that links humanitarian preparedness, development and climate resilience.
The 2026 El Niño outlook provides an opportunity to invest before the emergency. It allows authorities to test contingency plans, humanitarian organisations to pre-position supplies, health systems to prepare for outbreaks, communities to strengthen preparedness, governments to address known infrastructure weaknesses and neighbouring countries to improve systems for managing transboundary risk. The forecast gives the region something emergency responders rarely have once disaster begins: time. That time should be used.
Across the Horn, we often know a crisis is coming but wait for visible suffering before releasing the resources needed to act. By then, prevention has become recovery. Anticipatory action is meant to change this by ensuring that credible forecasts trigger proportionate, evidence-based responses before losses occur. In the Kenya–Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands, this requires stronger coordination among meteorological institutions, disaster-management authorities, county governments, humanitarian and development partners, local organizations and communities.
Yet an important gap remains between preparedness planning and the financing required to activate early action at scale. Some anticipatory actions have already been identified through preparedness planning and risk analysis, but resources have not yet been secured for all the actions required ahead of the 2026 rains. This creates a critical implementation gap: a community may have a warning, an identified trigger and an agreed action, but still lack the financing, logistics or institutional arrangements needed to act when the trigger is reached. Closing this gap should be an immediate priority for governments, donors and partners before the peak rainfall period.
The Dawa basin offers a practical example: upstream rainfall monitored, river levels tracked, flood-risk information shared across borders and communities warned through channels they trust. Clear thresholds would activate preparedness plans, release support before households sell productive assets, move livestock before floodwaters arrive, position water-treatment supplies, prepare health facilities and identify evacuation routes and vulnerable households. Success would be measured not by dramatic response images, but by fewer displaced families, destroyed farms, disease outbreaks, blocked roads, livestock losses and children missing school.
The 2026 El Niño outlook should therefore be treated as more than a climate forecast. It is a planning signal. Across the Mandera–Dawa landscape, the wider Kenya–Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands and the broader Horn of Africa, there is still time to map flood risks, reinforce vulnerable infrastructure, pre-position WASH and health supplies, strengthen community warning systems, establish evacuation arrangements, protect livestock and agricultural assets, agree anticipatory financing, improve cross-border information-sharing and ensure warnings reach the last household. But that window will not remain open indefinitely.
The Horn of Africa does not need to choose between humanitarian response and long-term development; it needs to connect them. The rains will come and the river will rise again. The question is not whether the Horn can stop nature, but whether it can reduce the suffering that follows. The true measure of an early-warning system is not only how accurately it predicts the flood, but how much suffering it prevents. The true measure of resilience is not simply how quickly a community recovers, but whether it is stronger, safer and better prepared when the next shock arrives. The warning has been issued. Now comes the harder part: acting on it.
Citation sources:
- Mandera County Government /NDMA reporting on the 2020 and 2023 Mandera floods, including affected households, farms, cultivated land and water intake points.
- IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) / Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum seasonal forecast and regional outlook for the October–December rainfall season.
- Somalia Disaster Management Agency (SoDMA) and humanitarian reporting on the 2023 Somalia floods, including affected, displaced and deceased populations.
- RACIDA operational perspectives and field experience from the Mandera–Dawa landscape and Kenya–Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands.
RACIDA | September 2026
This opinion article draws on operational perspectives and field experience from the wider Mandera–Dawa landscape and the interconnected Kenya–Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands, alongside evidence from national authorities [1], regional climate institutions [2] and humanitarian agencies [3]. It is intended to contribute to public conversation, preparedness planning, donor engagement and coordinated early action ahead of the 2026–27 El Niño-associated rainfall season.
