In 2024, Southern Africa battled a quadrumvirate of catastrophes: the worst drought in a century, the deadliest cholera outbreak in at least a decade, four tropical cyclones and storms, and mass displacement of people and animals.
According to The Southern African Development Community (SADC), the 2023/24 El Niño caused ‘the worst drought ever recorded across the region’.
It ran throughout the year, completely frustrating harvest in the January to March 2024 agricultural season. By the start of March 2024, maize cultivated on about 1 million hectares in central and southern Zambia, which make up nearly 50 percent of the country’s maize-growing area, had completely dried up.
In late 2024, a great section of the region was badly in need of humanitarian aid; SADC Executive Secretary Elias Magosi said, in August, that about 68 million people in the region needed quick and serious intervention.
The projection of The World Food Programme (WFP) was that until the next harvest of May this year, the devastating effects of the drought would continue to be felt.
In high-level crisis meetings, SADC, The United Nations and other international organizations agreed on interventions with a focus on timely assistance and investment in resilience building to temper the devastating effects of the climate crisis. While they put in effort, the extent of the damage was too big. Little could be done for normalcy to return to the farmers within the year.
A projected La Niña in late 2024, however, promised a reprieve, albeit with the risk of flash floods and cyclones.
In this Southern Africa region, about 70 percent of the people rely on agriculture, according to The WFP. Amid the devastation, it was estimated that between September 2024 and 2025, by what time a semblance of normalcy is expected, about US$369 million would be needed in aid.
In a continent largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, with most of its farmers smallholder, excesses in rain, or long periods without it, are often responsible for near-irreparable ruin to livelihoods. Due to the accelerated climate change, Africans can expect a higher rate of recurrence of such extreme weather conditions in the future.
In Southern Africa in 2024, for example, five countries had already declared national drought disasters by August: Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, says WFP. Mozambique and Angola are also severely affected.
Here, millions of livelihoods have been devastated and economies, and ecosystems, across the region severely disrupted leading to emergence and re-emergence of diseases. In these extreme circumstances, people have had to take unprecedented measures for survival.
Namibia, for example, had culled 723 wild animals by September last year to provide meat to those affected by the drought, an unusual human encroachment into the wild due to the dire times. It was, to governments, a regrettable inconvenience.
“The pressures of poverty, climate change, and land use are forcing governments to make difficult choices that may not always favor wildlife. The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) recognizes that conservation is no longer solely about protecting wildlife or bettering protected areas management; it has become an economic, political, and social issue that must be addressed holistically,” noted the AWF.
Also, heavily reliant on hydroelectric power, a number of countries in the south struggled to supply their citizens with enough power during the year, with slashed hydropower capacity leading to long, intermittent electricity cuts. Needless to say, this had serious effects on the output of nations’ workforce, with industrial activities hugely paralysed, and therefore impacting already struggling economies negatively.
As Africa braces for possible similar climate conditions in the future, more preparedness is needed. Solutions for Africa by Africa are necessary, and collaboration among its experts will be crucial in keeping it ready for these devastating problems.
The continent will, for example, need very early detection of possible climate catastrophes and tailor-made solutions for each of them to avoid widespread ruin in the future. Alongside this, once in the eye of the storm, ease of accessing the most affected people with aid will be crucial, and so monitoring of their situation and locations, and analysing the availability, and accessibility, of such aid in a timely manner must be considered. In the past many months, WFP and partners have been providing food and cash-based transfers to the affected in many of these southern Africa countries, but preventive solutions would have eased this burden.
Africa will also need quick adoption of products of agricultural biotechnology, seeds for food crops that can withstand extreme drought and disease conditions. A strip along these recently affected countries is arid, thus perennially in need of interventions that preserve food security. Governments will need to be committed to fast-tracking policies that allow for this, with the potential of improving farmers’ livelihoods and mitigating such adverse droughts in the future.
Experts from across the One Health spectrum also need to work together to identify areas of collaboration for Africa’s robust health and food security. Governments will also need to structure their budgets to cater for these catastrophes, focusing on proactivity than reactivity, to ensure Africa is more resilient in the face of the rapid climate change.
By Peter Theuri, ISAAA AfriCenter