East Africa: Horn of Africa must build long-term resilience against drought
By Patrick Kormawa
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Human activities, for example deforestation and unsustainable agriculture practices may cause droughts while other exogenous factors such as global warming and climate change play a significant part. The impact of these disasters on communities is high, continuing to rise in frequency and is mostly felt in the agriculture, livestock and food sectors.
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In order to disentangle this predicament, governments and development partners must understand risk and vulnerability in this region and move towards durable solutions to mitigate the effects when droughts strike again.
One way of doing this is to link emergency to resilience. It is imperative for countries and development partners to create the link between humanitarian aid, as a rapid response measure in crises situations, and medium and long-term development plans. This approach requires untangling the complex humanitarian and development nexus to seek joint humanitarian-development approaches and collaborative implementation, monitoring and progress tracking.
A holistic resilience strategy, based on national development and investment plans, must be in place so as to protect livelihoods from shocks, and to make food production systems capable of absorbing the impact of disruptive events. Such actions empower farmers and pastoralists in modern farming practices, applications of new farming technologies, disease identification and prevention, selection of seeds, postharvest handling and marketing.
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