There are places where the earth begins to crack before people do.

In southern Somalia, the land opens in thin brown lines beneath the sun, splitting quietly under months of heat and absence. Wells sink into silence. Riverbeds turn to memory. The wind carries dust where it once carried the scent of wet soil and grazing animals. In villages built around water and livestock, life has always followed the rhythm of the rains. And when the rains fail, everything else begins to loosen.

A family leaves first with what can be carried.

A blanket. A cooking pot. A child asleep on a shoulder. Goats too weak to walk are left behind. The road stretches toward the outskirts of cities—toward camps of plastic sheeting and waiting, toward places where water arrives in trucks and food in measured portions.

Across Somalia, this movement has become a familiar sorrow.

The United Nations migration agency, the International Organization for Migration, said this week that nearly 62,000 people have been displaced by drought across five Somali districts since the beginning of the year. In those districts, three out of every four new displacements are linked directly to drought—a stark sign that climate shocks are not merely a backdrop, but the main force moving people from their homes.

And the numbers may grow.

The IOM estimates that another 125,000 people could be displaced between now and the end of June if rainfall remains uneven and conditions continue to deteriorate. Officials believe the true national figure may already exceed 300,000, though data remains incomplete in many regions.

The story begins, as many Somali crises do, with rain that did not come.

Consecutive failed rainy seasons have emptied reservoirs and weakened grazing land. Water points have dried. Crops have withered before harvest. Livestock—often a family’s only savings, livelihood, and source of food—have died in large numbers. In a country where farming and pastoralism remain the spine of daily life, drought is not only a weather event. It is an unraveling.

The outskirts of Kismayo and Mogadishu have become landscapes of arrival.

New camps stretch outward in pale rows of tarpaulin and cloth. Children are screened for malnutrition beneath temporary shelters. Women queue for water. Men search for day labor in towns already burdened by scarcity. Aid agencies warn that displacement sites are overcrowded and underfunded, with limited sanitation and growing risk of disease.

And hunger walks alongside thirst.

The Somali government and the United Nations said earlier this year that about 6.5 million people are facing acute food insecurity—nearly double the number from the year before. More than 1.8 million children under the age of five are projected to suffer acute malnutrition in 2026, with hundreds of thousands at risk of severe acute malnutrition.

In some regions, conflict deepens the drought’s reach.

Armed violence disrupts markets and blocks access to aid. Roads become unsafe. Communities already weakened by years of instability find themselves pressed between insecurity and climate. Humanitarian funding, too, has grown thin, with agencies warning that assistance may slow or stop without urgent international support.

Still, the seasons continue their uncertain pattern.

The current Gu rains, which usually arrive between April and June, have brought scattered showers to parts of the country. In some southern districts, there has been brief relief. Elsewhere, the skies remain dry. Even where rain falls, recovery is slow. A dead herd does not return with one storm. A failed harvest cannot be undone in a week.

So Somalia waits.

It waits beneath a sky that has become unreliable. It waits in camps where children sleep on woven mats and mothers count meals. It waits in fields where the soil remembers water better than the people can.

And still the roads remain full.

Each family walking them carries more than belongings. They carry the quiet weight of leaving—of homes abandoned not by war alone, but by weather.

In Somalia, the drought is not only a crisis of climate.

It is a crisis of movement, hunger, memory, and endurance. And beneath the long white light of the Horn of Africa, the earth continues to crack, one silent line at a time.

AI Image Disclaimer Illustrations were created using AI tools and are intended as conceptual representations.

Sources International Organization for Migration Reuters United Nations Al Jazeera World Food Programme