East Africa Braces for Poor Harvests After One of Its Driest Rainy Seasons on Record
05 October 2026, Africa: Large parts of East Africa are heading into poor harvests after the June to September rainy season came in “exceptionally poor” across the northern and western parts of the region, with rainfall deficits of 100 to 300 millimetres recorded across affected areas, according to assessments from the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor reported on October 3. Record high temperatures have compounded the effect of the dry conditions, the assessment found, pointing to below-average yields and reduced pasture for livestock across Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Somalia.
In Kenya specifically, forecasts from the Kenya ADAPT project, run in partnership with the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, suggest maize yields in western counties could come in up to 36 percent below average this season, based on the GEOCIF crop yield forecasting model. Western Kenya is one of the country’s main maize growing belts, making a shortfall of this magnitude significant for a staple crop that underpins food security for millions of households.
A season that failed from the start
Unlike flash droughts that develop mid-season, this year’s shortfall traces back to the rains themselves failing to materialise in adequate volume from June onward across northern and western parts of the region. Compounding the rainfall deficit with record heat has accelerated soil moisture loss and crop stress beyond what the rainfall numbers alone would suggest, pushing yield forecasts for maize and other staples below what even a moderately dry season would typically produce.
The affected zone spans some of the same areas that have cycled through repeated drought years over the past decade, including the 2020-2023 stretch that pushed parts of the Horn of Africa into one of its most severe food security crises in recent memory. Pastoral communities, who depend on rangeland condition rather than crop yields directly, face a related but distinct problem, since reduced pasture growth affects livestock body condition and, in turn, milk yields and the prices herders can fetch for animals, often the main household asset families draw down during lean periods.
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Monitoring systems built from past crises
The forecasting tools being used to track this season, GEOGLAM’s Crop Monitor and Kenya’s ADAPT and GEOCIF systems, were built up substantially in the years following earlier East African food crises, with the explicit goal of giving governments and humanitarian agencies earlier warning than rainfall data alone would provide. Catching a poor season this early, while the harvest is still weeks away in most of the affected countries, is intended to give governments more lead time to plan import needs, target food assistance and support farmers with programmes such as drought-tolerant seed distribution before shortages fully materialise.
Whether that earlier warning translates into earlier and more effective government and donor response remains the open question in each of these cycles, since funding and logistics for food assistance have historically lagged even well-flagged forecasts in the region.
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