Worrying pattern that fuels country's droughts cycle
Health & Science
By
Mactilda Mbenywe
| Feb 06, 2026
Carcass of a goat in Dadatacha Ananii village, Isiolo South, hard hit by drought on February 4, 2026. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]
On one scorching February afternoon in Lodwar, thermometers touched 38°C. In Mandera and Wajir, the heat climbed just as high.
The Kenya Meteorological Department's latest weekly bulletin warns that “most parts of the country are expected to be sunny and dry,” with only scattered showers expected in the highlands and Lake Victoria basin.
For communities in the country's north and north eastern regions, that forecast landed on an already cracked ground.
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But even the other parts of the country have not been spared. Last year's short rains fell short.
However, the problem is not a one-season concern. It's a pattern. Drought is no longer a rare climatic shock that arrives once in a generation and retreats after a good rainy season.
Scientists say the climate system that once spaced dry years far apart has shifted. Rainfall has grown erratic. Heat no longer fades between seasons. Soils dry faster after storms. When rain finally comes, it often arrives in short, violent bursts that run off hardened earth instead of sinking in.
The result? Droughts that return faster and linger longer.
Data paints the scale starkly. This year's drought has worsened due to failure of rains on multiple seasons, leaving millions facing food and water shortages and livestock losses especially in arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL).
An emergency assessment found that about 2.2 million people were already facing acute food insecurity by early last year, with more than 266,000 in the “emergency” category in Turkana, Mandera, Garissa, Wajir, and Marsabit.
Projections showed those numbers climbing months later. The Kenya Red Cross Society reported children dropping out of school, families selling breeding livestock, and women trekking up to 10 kilometres a day for water.
During the 12th National Climate Outlook Forum in Nairobi on Wednesday, Red Cross officials said communities in Mandera and Wajir, were walking with their animals for more than 14 kilometres in search of water and pasture.
“Even if ASAL areas receive average rainfall, it may not be enough to offset the deficit on the ground,” warned Kenya Meteorological Department Acting Director Edward Muriuki.
The statement sums up the crisis. The problem is no longer whether rain will fall; it is about if landscapes that have baked under repeated heatwaves can absorb and store it long enough to rebuild pasture, crops and groundwater reserves.
Meteorologists increasingly focus on rainfall intensity rather than total seasonal figures, noting that storms have become heavier while the dry spells between them have stretched longer.
Higher temperatures accelerate evaporation from soils and vegetation, leaving grasslands brittle within days of rainfall and shrinking water pans before herds can fully recover.
Late last month, Lodwar recorded the country’s highest temperature at 38.3°C, while Nyahururu plunged to 5.3°C at night, illustrating the widening extremes now shaping the country’s weather systems.
Such extremes accelerate evaporation. Vegetation loses moisture faster. Water pans shrink within days.
Across ASAL counties, climate stress has pushed average distances to water points up by 30 per cent, sometimes nearly 10 kilometres, humanitarian assessments found.
The Red Cross called the situation “a second consecutive failed season in areas still recovering from the 2021–2022 drought,” warning ecosystems had become too fragile to rebound before the next shock hit .
The failure of the October–December rains was linked to La Niña conditions in the Pacific, which often suppress rainfall in East Africa, the weatherman explained.
But scientists say climate change now loads the dice.
Warmer air holds more moisture, intensifying storms when they occur. Rising baseline temperatures mean landscapes dry faster between events. Seasonal rhythms that farmers and herders once relied on October short rains, March long rains have grown unreliable.
Human pressures amplify those shifts.
Population growth has pushed cultivation into marginal lands. Charcoal burning and deforestation thin vegetation cover. Overgrazing around shrinking water points strip soils bare. When drought strikes again, there is little buffer left.
In drought-hit counties, the cascade moves quickly. Crop failures drive food prices up. Milk production drops as cattle weaken. Families cut meals from three to one a day.
During one emergency cash programme, households told Red Cross monitors that grants allowed them to raise daily meals from one to three.
But nutrition surveys still recorded over 800,000 children under five needing treatment for acute malnutrition nationwide, alongside more than 120,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women.
Water scarcity fuels disease. Cholera and diarrhoea spike when families turn to unprotected sources.
Clinics struggle with stock-outs as caseloads climb. Mental strain rises too. Aid agencies reported increasing anxiety and depression among pastoralists who lost entire herds, often their sole livelihood.
Migration brings new risks.
Women and girls walking long distances for water face higher exposure to violence. Children leave school to herd. Inter-community clashes flare around wells and grazing corridors.
Safia Verjee, Kenya Red Cross Executive Director, International Centre for Humanitarian Affairs, urged authorities to turn forecasts into action: “Let us ensure that early warnings consistently lead to early and effective action, leaving no community behind.”
The country's February outlook carres cautious optimism. Meteorologists expect the food-producing highlands to receive near-normal precipitation in the March–April–May long rains. But ASAL counties will only get average to below-average rains, and coastal regions even less.
Environment Cabinet Secretary Deborah Barasa urged preparedness across agencies, warning that the “multifront challenge” requirs climate information to reach vulnerable communities in time.
While appreciating the country has not yet crossed the threshold for a national emergency, she was cautious that the rains might not reverse the damage already done.
This inconsistency defines Kenya’s new climate reality. Rain may fall. Drought may persist.
Scientists now frame the crisis less as a sequence of disasters and more as a new climate regime. Hotter baseline temperatures. Erratic seasons. Short recovery windows.
Amid this cycle, humanitarian agencies respond with water trucking, solar-powered boreholes, cash transfers, and nutrition clinics. County governments expand early-warning systems and mobile weather alerts. Meteorologists push forecasts via USSD codes for farmers without smartphones .
Those steps save lives. They do not change the physics of a warming atmosphere.
Scientists observe that long-term resilience demands groundwater recharge, rangeland restoration, climate-smart farming, drought-tolerant crops, and diversified livelihoods beyond livestock alone.
“Without that shift, Kenya risks sliding from emergency to emergency. The dry seasons keep returning,” says Patrick Odhiambo, an ecologist at Ecology Without Borders.
And for millions in the north and the east, the next drought no longer waits for memory to fade; it arrives as the last one still grips the land.