‘First I lost my livestock, then I lost my children’

Three months ago, Dahir’s youngest children made a seemingly trivial decision that would cost them their lives. Amina and Muhammed, aged four and six, drank the dirty water lurking at the bottom of the rocky crater, all that was left of the oasis.

They had few other options – water is increasingly scarce across Sanaag, an arid region in eastern Somaliland. But within days, the pair had developed severe diarrhoea. Dahir, increasingly fearful about their deterioration, was desperate to take Amina and Muhammed to a health clinic in nearby Garadag.

Yet the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 40 years had decimated his livestock – his goat herd dwindled from 300 to just 30 over 18 months. As he lost his animals, he lost his income. Soon, he’d lose his children, too.

“The water wasn’t healthy… they got very sick,” Dahir said, wrapping a scarf over his head to protect against the harsh midday sun. “I couldn’t get the money for transport to bring the children to the stabilisation clinic… my beloved died.

“I was so heartbroken, I felt like I can’t do anything to support my children,” he told the Telegraph. “They were so lovely, we had hoped for a great future for them.” 

Now, as Dahir mourns the death of his children, he is also contending with an increasingly uncertain future. The severe drought also threatens the pastoralist lifestyle which has sustained his family for generations.

In Somalia and Somaliland – a de facto country internationally recognised as northern Somalia, despite declaring independence 31 years ago – at least 805,000 people have already been forced to leave their homes in search of food and water this year.

It’s a number that will almost certainly rise in the coming months. Little rain is forecast, and humanitarian groups have warned there is a “concrete risk” of an unprecedented fifth failed rainy season come autumn.

Meanwhile the war in Ukraine and Russia’s “weaponisation” of grain has caused a global food security crisis that has been keenly felt a region dependent on Black Sea imports. 

Across the Horn of Africa, where prices have skyrocketed, at least 18 million people are currently facing food shortages. In Somalia, 213,000 are predicted to be in the grips of famine by September, while the UN has warned that 365,000 children could die from malnutrition this year. The World Health Organization has labelled the drought a grade three health emergency, the agency’s highest crisis ranking. 

“We don’t know where the bottom is yet for this crisis,” Michael Dunford, head of the World Food Programme in Eastern Africa, told the Telegraph. “The fact is that we are in a devastating situation already, and the likelihood is that it’s going to continue.”

He added that, already, roughly three million livestock have died as a result of the drought – including up to 30 per cent of herds in Somalia. The decline in meat and milk production has  aggravated food insecurity and left millions reliant on humanitarian assistance.

“If you lose your animals, you’ve lost your livelihood,” he said. “It’s not like [in the West], where if we lose our computer we can buy another one. We’re talking about a whole way of life, the relationships pastoralists have with this way of life and how it defines them is very intimate.”

In the past, it is thought that as many as 70 per cent of Somalis were nomadic, travelling across the region with their livestock to hunt for pasture and water. Now, once portable Somali huts are increasingly clustered in displacement camps on the outskirts of towns, while animal carcusses are scattered across the barren landscape.

“We are seeing massive displacement of people,” said Abdul Risaac, the mayor of the small city of Burao in central Somaliland. “Some villages haven’t received rainfall since late 2020 until now… and communities do not have alternative sources of livelihood or coping mechanisms for when drought hits.

“So we are seeing schools close as families leave when they lose their livelihood,” he added. “Also waterborne diseases are rising as people are drinking unsuitable water, and malnutrition is rising as people do not have enough food to give to their children.”

In Ainabo, a regional hub in western Somaliland, Selma* is among the newest arrivals at a displacement camp home to roughly 12,000 people. The 20-year-old mother of two once had around 100 goats and sheep; none now remain. 

“We realised we couldn’t survive, so we came to this place,” she told the Telegraph last month, gesturing at the sprawling, dusty camp.

“Imagine losing all your livestock, the source of your income and the food for your children – then leaving your home and travelling a long distance, to somewhere where you don’t know what it looks like,” she said. “I was very scared for our future.”

It’s not that the family has never lost animals before, she added; a lack of rainfall has long been part of life here. Previously, though, enough survived to gradually rebuild the herd. But the gap between severe droughts has narrowed – with three in the last 11 years – as climate change has exacerbated the severity and frequency of shocks and eroded resilience. 

“We can only go back to the countryside if we have livestock,” Selma said. “It’s my dream to return, but now we’re goatless and have no way of breeding more animals. It’s hard to know what our options are. All I know is being a pastoralist.”

Some 80 miles away, on the road to Garadag, Anab stands among her relatives outside a broken down truck containing deconstructed Somali huts and what’s left of the family’s livestock. 

Once the driver has solved the vehicle’s latest mechanical issue, the group will continue their journey towards the Ethiopian border in the hope of finding rain and pasture to save the remaining goats. Already, the family have been forced to discard several of the weakest en route, throwing their emancipated bodies overboard.

“This is the first time we are migrating so far away from our community,” Anab, 70, said. “It’s a sad story for all of us, it’s not something I expected to happen… I hope in this new place the situation will improve, but I can’t predict it. I can’t predict whether we will lose our way of life.”

Increasing migration in search of food and water is not new. According to Dr Nisar Majid, a research associate at the London School of Economics focused on Somalia, pastoralism has been in decline for decades. But the trend is accelerating as climate shocks intensify, and “Somalia now has one of the highest rates of urbanisation in the world”. 

“[Major droughts are] becoming more frequent… which means it is getting harder to make a living from pastoralism,” Dr Majid said. “And when you lose significant numbers of animals, it takes a long time to recover.” 

However, it isn’t just the drought that has made life here more difficult for Somalis, according to the latest report from the Famine Early Warning System. Several factors have combined and threaten to push hundreds of thousands into famine.

Harvests across the Horn of Africa were devastated by desert locusts in 2020, while the pandemic hit the economy hard. Not only did the international diaspora send less remittance money, but disruption to the Hajj pilgrimage hit incomes – Somalia usually sells millions of animals to Saudi Arabia to feed pilgrims, but exports in 2020 fell by 50 per cent.

An uptick in insecurity, combined with delayed elections in Mogadishu, has also exacerbated the situation in central and southern Somalia, where the drought is most severe. Here, reports of families leaving territory controlled by the extremist group Al Shabaab in search of help, only to lose family members en route to displacement camps, are mounting.

A different conflict almost 5,000 miles away has had an outsized impact on the region, too. Somalia imports about half of its national food supply – including more than 90 per cent of wheat from Ukraine and Russia, according to the UN. In some areas, the cost of cereals and cooking areas has now risen by as much as 160 per cent.

“Several factors have had a cumulative impact on local communities over several years,” said Abdinasir Sahal, Save the Children’s area representative in Somaliland. “That is why the situation now is so acute.” 

At a health clinic in Garadag, a cluster of women and children are sheltering from the midday sun underneath a concrete veranda. Among them Khadija* cradles her daughter Asma*, who is clinging onto an empty packet of the peanut butter-based plumpy'nut supplement used to treat malnutrition. Aged two, Asma weighs just 12 pounds.

The pair come from a family of pastoralists, but the drought pushed them into town after their livestock died. That move has brought little respite in the face of rampant inflation. In February it cost 60,000 Somaliland shillings to buy 15kg of rice from the local market, which Khadija would eke out for a month. Now the price is 90,000. 

“It just means we can afford less food, and have less ability to buy clean water and other things we need,” Khadjia said, glancing down at the quiet toddler nestled in her lap. “I just don’t have enough food for her to eat… I worry what could happen if the situation doesn’t change.”

The upheaval to lives and livelihoods triggered by the climate change, conflict and soaring inflation will not be contained in the Horn of Africa. Experts have warned it could trigger a new migration crisis. 

“People won’t necessarily stay where they are and die, they will likely move,” said the WFP’s Mr Dunford. “I don’t want to speculate about where people are ultimately going to land but, of course, people will go wherever they feel like they can find a job and an ability to support themselves – and they’re going to have to take increased levels of risk.

“Also, people who are pushed into desperate situations will do desperate things, there’s a risk of radicalisation in some communities. [The West] can’t isolate ourselves, I think that’s important to realise.”

Yet international support is limited as aid budgets have been cut and other crises, including the war in Ukraine, have soaked up resources. Currently the Somalia Humanitarian Response Plan – which is seeking $1.5 billion – is just 18 per cent funded. The UK, which committed £861m of aid to prevent famine in 2017, has pledged £40m so far this year. 

NGOs say this has forced them to make tough decisions, including “taking food from the hungry to feed the starving”. The WFP, for instance, has already halted malnutrition prevention programmes, diverting resources to treat those already suffering.

“In the absence of funding we have had to cut rations, [and] affected populations are forced to survive on less,” said Mr Dunford, adding that this has “devastating impacts” for those populations over the long term.

The risk of death for a child who is severely malnourished is 11 times higher than for their healthy counterpart, for instance, and a lack of food in the early years of life has an irreversible impact on a child’s cognitive development.

Limited resources also means that the international community has fewer resources to respond to the secondary impacts of the drought, including outbreaks of cholera, watery diarrhoea and measles in displacement camps. 

Meanwhile, long term projects – including training in alternative livelihoods, constructing new boreholes and building healthcare capacity to reduce child and maternal mortality – are constrained.

“In 2017, the international community acted very quickly to prevent a situation like in 2011, [when 260,000 people died of famine],” added Mr Sahal. “This year, we have had limited funding, and the government capacity has also been affected by different disasters like Covid, which has reduced the ability to support communities… and means resilience is low. 

“The climate shocks we’ve seen in the last years, in the long run it’s something which we are worrying about because they’re not going away,” he added. “What is now important is to think about the resilience of communities to cope with such shocks, as well as the immediate emergency response to the drought, to better prepare for next time.”

Back at the Cadado water point in Sanaag, Dahir shrugs and points at his balding head. The stress over losing his livestock “is why I have no hair”, he joked.

Soon, though, the 70-year-old’s demeanour changes. “When it’s a normal season, when it’s rainy, water crosses this whole area,” he said, gesturing at the parched landscape. “You can imagine, we were living a prosperous life. There was grass, trees, a lot of pasture. There was a regular market, it was a meeting place for the community.”

That way of life does not currently exist. Dozens of families have already left the area, and Dahir is deliberating about whether he should follow them. 

“The drought has already robbed us of our loved ones,” he said. “And so I am very concerned about our fate. We have always lived from our livestock. What do we do now?”

*Some names have been changed

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