Kenya’s October–December 2025 short rains season has been confirmed as the driest on record since 1981, delivering just 30 to 60 percent of the long-term average rainfall across most of the country and triggering a deepening humanitarian crisis that now threatens the livelihoods and health of more than two million people nationwide.
The Kenya National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) has reported deteriorating conditions across 20 of the country’s 23 arid and semi-arid land (ASAL) counties, with parts of eastern Kenya recording their lowest short rains totals in over four decades. The failure of the season — which farmers and pastoralists rely on to replenish water sources, restore pastures, and harvest fast-maturing crops — has left communities with critically depleted food stocks and little prospect of self-recovery before the next rains arrive.
Food insecurity is escalating rapidly across affected regions, with counties such as Turkana, Mandera, Wajir, Marsabit, and Garissa among those recording the most severe deficits. The NDMA has warned of heightened risks of acute malnutrition, particularly among children under the age of five and lactating mothers, as well as increased vulnerability to disease outbreaks linked to contaminated or dramatically depleted water sources. Livestock deaths — a critical indicator of pastoral household wealth — have also been reported as pasture coverage collapses across the north and northeast, compounding the economic shock to communities already operating on thin margins.
Kenya’s ASAL counties cover roughly 80 percent of the country’s land mass and are home to some of its most structurally vulnerable populations. These regions are exposed to cyclical drought as a matter of geography, but climate scientists and development experts increasingly point to a marked rise in the frequency and severity of below-normal rainfall seasons over recent decades. The 2025 short rains failure arrives on the back of sustained climatic instability across the broader Horn of Africa and follows the devastating multi-season drought of 2021 to 2023, from which many communities had not yet fully recovered. That earlier crisis was widely described as one of the worst in the region in 40 years — a record that eastern Kenya’s rainfall data now appears to have erased.
Humanitarian agencies operating in Kenya are calling for urgent government intervention and a significant scale-up of relief operations to prevent the crisis from worsening before the March–May 2026 long rains season. While that season offers some prospect of gradual recovery, forecasters caution that even a normal performance would take months to meaningfully restore pastures, refill water pans, and rebuild household food stocks. Kenya’s government, working through the NDMA and partner ministries, faces mounting pressure to accelerate food aid distribution, emergency livestock offtake and supplementary feeding programmes, and water trucking to the hardest-hit communities. Longer term, the crisis is renewing calls for sustained investment in drought-resilient infrastructure — including water harvesting systems, early-warning mechanisms, and diversified livelihood schemes — as climate variability increasingly makes seasons like the one just passed not an exception, but an emerging pattern.
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