Mandera County
Tri-border pastoralism faces 95% surface water depletion—335,000 need humanitarian assistance. By 2026: systems prevent famine or displacement accelerates.
Mandera exists because the tri-border exists—this remote county at Kenya's northeastern corner touches both Ethiopia and Somalia, creating a zone where international boundaries matter less than ethnic, clan, and resource connections spanning the region. The Somali pastoralists who dominate this landscape move herds across all three countries, following grazing patterns that predate colonial-era lines on maps.
2025 brought severe crisis. Governor Mohamed Adan Khalif declared drought emergency after three consecutive failed rainy seasons left 95% of surface water sources depleted. By late 2025, 120,000 residents received emergency water trucking; projections suggested 250,000 would need such assistance by January 2026 without rainfall. The 2025 Long Rains Assessment classified 335,000 residents as IPC Phase 3 (Crisis food insecurity), requiring humanitarian assistance.
Cross-border dynamics complicate everything. The Concern-funded Hanaano program operates across the Kenya-Somalia-Ethiopia triangle, providing nutrition support that ignores administrative boundaries. Climate stress exacerbates inter-clan conflict as competition intensifies over shrinking resources. Al-Shabaab presence in Somalia adds security complexity to an already fragile zone.
The county exhibits classic borderland vulnerability: remoteness from national capitals, dependence on cross-border systems that governments struggle to support, and climate exposure that overwhelms local adaptive capacity. By 2026, whether humanitarian systems can prevent famine and whether conflict management improves will determine if Mandera's population survives yet another crisis—or begins the displacement that recurring drought increasingly makes inevitable.