The importance of goats in East Africa’s recovery from drought
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by climate disasters, and they need something to return to.
Conflict, insecurity, political unrest and the search for economic opportunities continue to drive migration in the East and Horn of Africa. However, one of the biggest drivers of displacement is not war or the search for better jobs, but changing weather patterns. After five years of drought, more that 1.5-million people were uprooted from their homes as their soils slowly, year by year, dried and cracked. This year the skies opened up, lonely clouds joined each other, and the rains finally came. But the immediate effect was not joy as one would hope, because whenever there is drought, what follows are floods. Tract of soil hardened by years baking in the sun, turn into racing river beds. Hundreds of thousands who withstood the long dry period lost their homes to an unrelenting wet season. More than 311,000 people were displaced in the May flooding in Kenya alone. After suffering from a sustained dry period and now a definitive wet period, dare we hope for a return of internally di...
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