By Anna Abraham
Pastoral communities in East Africa have been hit hardest by a historic drought.
It’s 8 in the morning, when a group of Maasai pastoral women in Kajiado County, Kenya, begin their long journey to the Ewaso Nyiro river in the Rift Valley, which has been contaminated by horticultural activities upstream. It will take them 7 hours to return.

They used to transport water on the backs of donkeys, but since the advent of the drought, livestock is scarce. And, although the unclean water carries diseases like cholera and diarrhea, this part of Kenya has almost no access to healthcare; they must make do with what they find. This is the everyday reality of rural Africans in the era of climate change, where a La Niña-induced historic drought continues to ravage East Africa — namely Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and northern Uganda, causing extreme water scarcity and mass livestock death. These countries form the Horn of Africa, one of the most conflict-affected regions in the world, and are experiencing what experts have called the “world’s worst acute food insecurity emergency of 2022”.

For the fourth consecutive time, the rainy season has failed in East Africa and is likely to fail yet again in the short rains period from October to December this year.

The locust infestation that swept across the Horn of Africa in 2020 added to the food crisis. Over 20 million people are reeling from the effects of the drought, with many areas on the brink of localized famine. Over 1.8 million children are facing life-threatening malnutrition. To make matters worse, food prices are soaring due to global inflation.

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