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Rahma Hassan Mahmoud, a herder in Somaliland, of the catastrophe that befell her 300 goats and sheep and 20 camels. For Rahma, watching her animals die was to watch the life she knew ending. “We were like a soul living on top of another soul,” she said. “Our hearts were broken.”

By Aurora Almendral

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Photographs By Nichole Sobecki

Burao, Somaliland – So many died at once “it was like they were poisoned,” said Rahma Hassan Mahmoud, a herder in Somaliland, of the catastrophe that befell her 300 goats and sheep and 20 camels. After the last camel died, she and her family lived off milk from their neighbors, but with everyone else’s livestock dying, it wasn’t long before there wasn’t enough to go around.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Sabad Ali takes apart her family’s makeshift home in a camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) outside Burao, Somaliland, in December 2019. They came here in 2016 after drought killed their livestock, but now the government says they must move again because their plot is in disputed territory. She worries that relocating farther from Burao will make access to food aid, water, and informal work more difficult.

The people of Rahma’s village pooled money to rent a truck. Fifty of them climbed in for an overnight drive to the city of Burao, in central Somaliland. Along the road, they passed clusters of domed huts made from gathered wood, plastic sheets, and draped cloths—makeshift settlements housing people who, like them, had lived off the land but now depend on food distributions from the government and humanitarian aid organizations.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Somaliland’s parched landscape is seen from inside a crumbling colonial building in Sheikh. Pressures from a changing climate, which is intensifying droughts, along with a decades-long civil war, are shattering the region’s pastoral economy and forcing Somalis into IDP and refugee camps. Women in the camps live in constant fear of violence.

Somaliland’s parched landscape is seen from inside a crumbling colonial building in Sheikh. Pressures from a changing climate, which is intensifying droughts, along with a decades-long civil war, are shattering the region’s pastoral economy and forcing Somalis into IDP and refugee camps. Women in the camps live in constant fear of violence.

Somaliland – For These Women, An Age-Old Way Of Life Is Ending In The Horn Of Africa Somaliland is a country in the Horn of Africa that declared independence in 1991 from Somalia at the start of a civil war that continues today. Many Somalis are seminomadic herders who for as long as anyone can remember have moved with their animals to find the greenest pastures. But with a series of droughts in recent years, those ways are disappearing fast.

Like many Somalis, Rahma doesn’t keep track of her year of birth but counts her age by the annual rains. She was born in the year they call biyobadan, which means “a lot of water,” and estimates that she’s about 36. With her husband and 12 children, she settled in a sprawling camp for displaced people outside Burao, into a life she could neither recognize nor escape.

For Somalis, Rahma said, wealth had always been measured by the size of your herd and how much you have to share. “We didn’t need anybody’s help. We used to help others because we had so much.”

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Baarud, a five-month-old camel, tugs at Aadar Mohamed’s hijab. Baarud means tough, a name the camel inherited from his mother, who survived three droughts and a cyclone that killed off hundreds of other camels in the village of Hijiinle, on Somaliland’s north coast.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
This portrait of Rahma Hassan Mahmoud was taken at the Burao IDP camp. In 2016, a severe drought killed her herd of 300 sheep and goats and 20 camels, forcing Rahma, her husband, and 12 children to abandon their village.

About 30 years ago, the climate in the Horn of Africa began changing, slowly at first, then abruptly. A severe drought hit in 2016. Animals that survived succumbed the following year or in 2018—also drought years. The pastoral economy, Somaliland’s primary industry, shrank by 70 percent. Herders led thirsty animals to rumored waterholes, only to find them dry. The cavernous rib cages of rotting camels were a grim new landscape feature. Crops failed, and diseases such as cholera and acute diarrhea, broke out. Within three years, between half a million and 800,000 people—nearly a quarter of Somaliland’s population—had moved off this barren ground.

Jessica Tierney—a climate expert at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, who has studied ancient marine sediments off the coast of Somalia—found that the region is drying out faster now than at any time during the past 2,000 years.

“If anybody still doubts climate change,” said Sarah Khan, head of the Hargeysa sub-office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), “they just have to come here.”

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Sabad Ali takes apart her family’s makeshift home in a camp for Internally Displaced People (IDPs) outside Burao, Somaliland, in December 2019. They came here in 2016 after drought killed their livestock, but now the government says they must move again because their plot is in disputed territory. She worries that relocating farther from Burao will make access to food aid, water, and informal work more difficult.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Dusk falls at the Burao IDP camp, one of the largest in Somaliland, holding thousands of former pastoralists whose herds have died in droughts.

Only six years ago, Somalia was second to Australia in the export of sheep and was a major source of camels. The vibrant livestock economy supported a connected chain of people: the herders; the truckers who took the camels to market in Hargeysa, Somaliland’s capital, and elsewhere; the young boys who lured the camels out of the trucks, lining them up for sale. It employed municipal workers who collected taxes and stamped the animals, and longshoremen who ushered the camels into the cargo ships at the port of Berbera, bound for markets throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

On any given day, the Hargeysa camel market had hundreds of the animals for sale. But today, the bustle and hubbub are gone—perhaps a dozen camels paw at the ground as idled men sip tea and chat under the broiling morning sun.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Top row, left to right: Basra Ismaan Jaama, Nimo Mohamed Hussein, Yurub Jaama Shire, Yurub Suleiman Mohamed. Bottom row, left to right: Haweya Ahmed Adem, Sahra Adam Abdi, Deka Mohamed Roble, Fadumo Ibrahim Abdi and Hamdi, her daughter. Human traffickers persuaded the children of all these women in IDP camps in Somaliland to run away with them. Traffickers typically send parents audio messages of children screaming and photos of them bruised and bloodied to convince families to pay ransoms of between $5,000 and $17,000. When they can’t afford to pay, they’re told their children are dead. Fadumo rescued Hamdi from traffickers who had been stopped by police at the Ethiopian border. She now works as a community activist to raise awareness about the risks of child trafficking.

Millions on the move

The World Bank estimates that by 2050, 143 million people around the world will be forced to leave their homes to escape the effects of climate change. Some, such as Rahma and her family, will become IDPs, Internally Displaced People, with no clear alternative future. Others will become refugees, crossing an international border in the hope of securing a better life. For hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have fled war, drought, and famine in their country during recent decades, a better life remains elusive: Stranded in neighboring Kenya, in Dadaab—one of the world’s largest refugee camps, with nearly 220,000 people—all they can do is mark time.

International institutions, including NATO, the United States Department of Defense, and the UN describe climate change as a “threat multiplier,” meaning that it doesn’t play out in isolation but instead amplifies existing problems in societies, particularly in dry regions where the margin for human existence is already thin. In Somaliland and Somalia, climate pressures combine with poverty, weak governance, and internal conflict—a mix that weighs heavily on women.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
In 2016, Somali and Ethiopian migrants walk to caves outside Mareero, a smuggling hub in the autonomous region of Puntland, to await boats that will take them across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and from there to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states—if they survive. For some stranded in IDP or refugee camps, this perilous journey is preferable to a life in limbo.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Guude Aadan drags water from a hole dug in the ground in Hijiinle. She came here from her home village of Topta, after drought in 2017 killed her herd of 70 goats and sheep. She now depends on humanitarian aid—and food gifts from relatives.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Aisha Jaama, 40, watches as her daughters Maryam Yusuf, 15, and Haawa Yusuf, 12, practice Arabic in their compound in Lughaya, in northwestern Somaliland, where they came after drought killed off their herds. Living in a town, rather than as nomads, means the children can go to school and be prepared for a life other than pastoralism.

Women make up the majority in the IDP camps in Somalia and Somaliland. Some men stay behind in their villages, others join the fighting in the civil war, so it mostly falls to the women to feed and raise the children. In the camps, women also live with new risks and fears: increased violence, including rape. In Puntland, a region in Somalia east of Somaliland, gatekeepers at improvised displacement camps extort women for sexual favors in exchange for access to food and shelter. Desperation makes the camps recruiting grounds for human traffickers who persuade boys and girls to leave with them for Europe. Many of their young victims die en route.

“All I can think about is that we have nothing,” Rahma said about life in the camp outside Burao. “My children don’t have a future because this place doesn’t have a future.”

What caused this crisis?

Chris Funk, a geographer and climatologist at the University of Santa Barbara, in California, studies rainfall patterns in the Horn of Africa. The waters in the western Pacific off the coast of Indonesia are some of the warmest on the planet, he explained. When conditions are exceptionally warm and stormy, winds blow across the Indian Ocean toward Indonesia, drawing moisture away from East Africa, causing droughts there. Meanwhile, hotter, drier air evaporates more water from the land itself, exacerbating the effects. But when waters in the western Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa are exceptionally warm, that can lead to more intense winds blowing into Somalia. The result: flooding rains. These are the conditions that led to the unprecedented recent swarms of desert locusts in parts of East Africa. (Here’s how the swarms are threatening millions with hunger.)

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
A woman leaves a food depot in Dadaab refugee camp, in northern Kenya, after receiving her rations. The population in Dadaab, estimated at nearly 220,000, has risen and fallen with droughts in the Horn of Africa. Along with droughts, famine, and desertification, decades of civil war have pushed tens of thousands of Somalis across Kenya’s border into Dadaab.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
A woman walks past camels for sale in Dadaab as an armed Kenyan police officer looks on. Violence against women and girls is common in such camps, where societal ties and traditional forms of security are weak.

Somaliland and Somalia are “uniquely exposed climatically,” Funk said. Somaliland has no rivers, and people depend on ephemeral ponds that fill and recede with the rains or on boreholes that must be dug deeper and deeper to strike water. Unlike the bordering countries of Kenya and Ethiopia, the region doesn’t have mountainous highlands that stay wet and fertile even as the lowlands dry out. For months, there’s no rain. The plants wither, the ponds shrink to dirt. Sheep are the first to die, then goats, finally camels. Once the camels are gone, the humans have nothing left. They must move.

For Rahma, watching her animals die was to watch the life she knew ending. “We were like a soul living on top of another soul,” she said. “Our hearts were broken.”

Habibo and Nasteha

In 2010, Habibo Dakane Yussuf, who’s about 40 years old, walked from her village in southern Somalia to Dadaab refugee camp, 50 miles east of the Somalia border in Kenya. During her drought-driven, two-week trek, eight men raped her as her toddler son, Musab, wailed at her side. “They were really merciless,” Habibo said. The emotional trauma lingers, and she continues to have pain in her pelvis and chronic incontinence.

According to the International Rescue Committee—an NGO headquartered in New York City that runs a hospital for women in Dadaab—crowded conditions and the fractured society in refugee camps raise the risk of violence against women and girls. In October 2019, three men dragged Habibo’s nine-year-old daughter, Mandeck, from her school and sexually assaulted her, biting her and slicing her with razors. Habibo and her three children seldom leave their hundred-square-yard patch now.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Habibo Dakane Yussuf, who’s about 40, poses with her daughter Mandeck, 10, in Dadaab. Habibo left her village in Somalia in 2010 at the start of a drought that would drive 200,000 Somalis into Dadaab. As she walked to the border, she was raped by eight men. Last year, three men dragged Mandeck from her school in Dadaab and sexually assaulted her. The girl still bears the scars from the men’s bites. Habibo and her three children now rarely leave their small compound.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Nasteha Hassan Abdi, who’s about 16, holds her two-year-old son, Musab, in Dadaab refugee camp. When her family’s goats died in the drought of 2016, Nasteha’s grandmother sold her, then 12, into marriage to a man Nasteha said was old enough to be a father. The man beat and raped her. Nasteha escaped to Dadaab, where she found out she was pregnant.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Girls recite the Koran in a madrassa in Dadaab. Refugee camps are meant to be temporary solutions to acute crises, but Dadaab, which opened in 1991, is proof that some crises may drag on for lifetimes, a likely reality for many people fleeing climate change. Refugees living in camps are isolated from society—they can’t leave to pursue opportunities or build a future.

Aid organizations, including the United Nations Children’s Fund, note that child marriages increase after droughts. In the Horn of Africa and most other climate-affected regions, hardship and impoverishment contribute to families’ decisions to sell their young daughters in marriage.

Nasteha Hassan Abdi, perhaps 16 years old, is quiet, with a bright, eager smile. The conflict in southern Somalia left her an orphan, and about four years ago, after the family’s goats died in the drought of 2016, her grandmother sold her to a man in their town. She was 12. Nasteha doesn’t know how old he was but described him as old like a father. “He used to beat me up. He used to sleep with me frequently, which I didn’t like,” she said. When she cried, he told her that he’d paid for her and could do what he wanted.

It was two months before Natesha could escape to Dadaab. When she arrived, she found out she was pregnant.

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Anab Mohamed Oogle chops firewood outside the IDP camp in Burao. She says she’s afraid of this task because women gathering wood here have been raped. But she doesn’t have a son and must do it herself.
Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
A woman waits outside the International Rescue Committee’s support center for victims of gender-based violence in Dadaab refugee camp.

Halima Hassan Mohamed, a woman of about 50 who had known Nasteha as a child, took her in. “She was terribly young,” Halima said.

Nasteha carries her two-year-old son Musab on her hip and rarely leaves Halima’s side. They sleep in the same room in Halima’s tidy family compound. Halima is teaching Nasteha how to run her business, a tea shop in the camp, and glares at men whose eyes linger on the girl. She bought Nasteha a silver Casio watch, popular with the other teenagers in Dadaab, to ease the sting of peer pressure. Still, Halima worries that Nasteha might never be accepted. Other girls call her a slut for having a baby so young—and without a husband. Sometimes, when Nasteha is left alone for too long, Halima finds her crying.

“A father can die, and you can survive,” Halima said, but Nasteha didn’t have a mother, which is much worse. “Now she’s my child…I protect her the best I can.”

Climate Change Affects Somali Pastoralist, IDPs, Migrants and Refugees
Deka Ali Ahmed prays in her family’s compound in the Burao IDP camp. She came here during the 2016 drought after losing 300 sheep and goats and 25 camels. Many Somalis are grappling with an uncertain future, as the changing climate makes their traditional pastoral life in the Horn of Africa impossible.

Radical new thinking needed

Climate change is forcing Somali pastoralist culture into an unprecedented transformation that calls for radical thinking and innovation, said Sarah Khan, of the UNHCR. But, she added, “I think our responses are largely reactive. There’s this need to completely think out of the box, and I’m not sure who’s doing it.”

Shukri Ismail, Somaliland’s environment minister, admits that Somalis have degraded their environment by cutting down trees for charcoal, but, she said, the droughts afflicting their region have little to do with them. “The bigger picture is that the international world, the other world, is also destroying what we have… We don’t have industry. Industrial countries are taking their share of destroying.”

According to World Bank data, Somalia’s annual carbon emissions amount to 0.00001685 percent of what the world puts out annually.

Somalis derive few benefits from the modern industrial economy. Guude Aadan, for example, who’s about 50, said she’s ridden in a car five times in her life. She’s never flown on an airplane and doesn’t know anyone who has. She’s seen people use cell phones, but she’s never held one herself. She doesn’t own things that have been traded from China, the United States, or Saudi Arabia. “We’re nomads,” she said. “We don’t own anything.”

Countries have to work together to address climate change, Ismail said. “What affects us in here will affect other countries too… If it continues like this, many countries will be lost. Many people will die.”

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Khan said. International aid organizations tend to overlook Somaliland as a distant end of the Earth, and funds funneled into Somalia don’t get allocated to Somaliland. “Part of it is just neglect,” she said. “Part of it is being extremely poor and the sheer scale. How can you cope with over half a million people on the move in about four or five years?”

Somalis in IDP and refugee camps have no way to survive other than to accept government or humanitarian aid, and cities such as Hargeysa, with limited infrastructure and available jobs, can’t absorb tens of thousands of former pastoralists.

“I think it’s possible—it’s not impossible,” Khan said, to help the region’s people adapt to a new reality. Somaliland has a long, unused coastline, and with better management, investment, and training, former pastoralists could turn to fishing. Others could be taught skills to equip them for city life, such as becoming a mechanic or an electrician. Government and aid agencies could direct resources toward rainwater harvesting—reservoirs or cisterns in villages to collect any rain that falls. But these measures would require more funding from international institutions such as the World Bank, Khan said.

Guude’s home village, Topta, in northern Somaliland, was abandoned after the drought in 2016. She now lives a two-hour walk away in Hijiinle, near Lughaya, on the north coast, where she depends on humanitarian aid and the generosity of relatives. She moved there after her herd of 70 goats and sheep died.

Back when it rained reliably in Topta, Guude recalled, the trees grew, and the animals ate. She would wake up in the morning to green fields dotted with wildflowers and frolicking goats. The villagers plucked kulan, a bittersweet fruit, from the trees, and when their camels ate the kulan, their milk became sweeter. Families had milk and butter and enough meat for everyone. No one had to go to other towns begging for food.

They didn’t know it at the time, Guude said, but their life in Topta was happiness defined. “That is what I miss the most,” she said. “Everything.”


Aurora Almendral is a journalist based in Southeast Asia who has covered climate change and migration around the world. Follow her on Twitter @auroraalmendral and visit her website

Nichole Sobecki is a contributing photographer at National Geographic who focuses on humanity’s connection to the natural world. Born in New York, she has lived in Nairobi for the past eight years. Follow her on Instagram and visit her website.

Asma Dhama, Abdullahi Mire and Abdilahi Siciid Yusuf contributed reporting.

This story is part of an ongoing a larger series about women and migration created in collaboration with women photographers from The Everyday Projects.


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