Drought Tightens Its Grip on the Horn of Africa: 6.5 Million Face Hunger as the Rains Fail Again

The Horn of Africa is sliding back into crisis. After the worst drought in more than 40 years gripped Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia between 2021 and 2023 — leaving some 31.9 million people in need of aid — the region is once again drying out following failed rains in 2024 and 2025. As 2026 begins, at least 6.5 million people in Kenya and Somalia alone are facing high levels of hunger, and 2.5 million of them are children. Aid agencies including Concern Worldwide, the World Food Programme and the famine-monitoring network FEWS NET warn that the worst may still be ahead.

In Kenya, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) projects that more than 2.1 million people face acute hunger, concentrated in the arid counties of Turkana, Marsabit, Wajir, Garissa, Mandera and Baringo. Almost 742,000 children under the age of five, along with over 109,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women, are acutely malnourished and in urgent need of treatment. Kenya's short rains — which supply up to 70% of annual rainfall in some areas — again came in below normal.

Somalia is faring no better. Around 3.4 million people there face acute food insecurity, a figure the IPC expects to climb toward 4.4 million — close to a quarter of the population. Through June 2026, the IPC estimates that nearly half of all Somali children under five will require treatment for acute malnutrition, with hundreds of thousands of severe cases. Internally displaced families, many of them women and children who have fled both drought and conflict, are among the hardest hit.

This story links to three UN Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 13 (Climate Action) is the root cause — scientists find global warming has made this drought roughly 100 times more likely. SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) is its human toll, with 6.5 million people in Kenya and Somalia, including 2.5 million children, now facing severe hunger. And SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) sits at the heart of it: failed rains have dried up the wells, rivers and pasture that families across the Horn of Africa depend on to survive.

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In Ethiopia's Somali region, child wasting has already surpassed emergency thresholds, affecting more than 15% of children even as funding cuts strain treatment and health services. The World Food Programme estimates that 6.8 million Ethiopians will need food assistance this year. Across the three countries, FEWS NET reckons 20 to 25 million people now require humanitarian food aid.

Scientists are unequivocal that climate change is a driving force. A 2023 World Weather Attribution study concluded that global warming has made drought in the region roughly 100 times more likely. With around 80% of people in the Horn relying on farming or livestock, each failed season strips away the resources families need to survive. And when the rains finally do return, they increasingly arrive as destructive flash floods on parched ground, washing away crops and homes rather than replenishing them.

The tragedy is that the tools to prevent catastrophe already exist. Early Warning Early Action programmes and cash transfers helped avert famines in Somalia in 2017 and 2023. But the response is chronically underfunded: by October 2025, just 21% of Somalia's humanitarian appeal had been met, and around 170 health facilities had been affected by the shortfall. Aid workers say the gaps left by funding cuts will only deepen the damage of this latest drought.

Why it matters

It is hard to talk about drought in isolation when, at the very same moment, people elsewhere on the continent are dying in heavy rains and flooding. In Ghana and across West and Southern Africa, too much water is proving as deadly as too little in the east — two faces of the same unravelling climate. We keep staring at temperature records as though they were isolated facts, but the ripple effects are vast and, at times, almost impossible to grasp in full: failed harvests, dead livestock, empty wells, families on the move, children whose growth is stunted before they ever reach school.

What is it like to have no food on your plate at the end of a long day? What is it like to look into your children's eyes knowing they will go to bed hungry? These are not abstractions for 6.5 million people in the Horn of Africa — they are tonight. So, once again, we are here calling for concrete steps. Fund the response before the images of emaciated children force the world to look. Invest in the early-warning and resilience programmes that already work. Because every action point, however small, is one step closer to a better future.