Mekelle — The devastating impact of drought in Central Tigray's Kolla Tembien district this week is the latest indicator of a growing crisis that has steadily worsened across the region over the past year.
In Yaqer locality alone, more than 18,000 livestock have died and hundreds of hectares of farmland have failed, compounding fears of a return to famine conditions in a region still reeling from the effects of war.
Goitom Gebrehaweria, head of the district's economic sector, told Addis Standard that 184 cattle, 900 donkeys, more than 4,500 sheep, over 13,000 goats, and 200 beehives have perished due to the combined effects of failed rains and fodder exhaustion. "Rain has not hit the locality until today," he said. "Bees have also been wiped out entirely."
He also reported alarming signs of malnutrition among children and the elderly, with swelling and other hunger-related symptoms emerging. Meanwhile, 650 hectares of farmland remain unsown, and 50 hectares of sesame have failed to germinate. In neighboring villages such as Shilum Emni, Mitsha Worki, Zelakme, Arena, Newi, Chomo, Dedere, and Simret Guya, over 900 hectares of cultivated land have also failed due to drought.
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Despite repeated appeals, Goitom said no emergency assistance has reached the area so far.
Gebrehiwet Gebregzabher, head of the regional Disaster Risk Management Bureau, confirmed his office received a letter from the district. "Officials from the district were here [in Mekelle] with us today [Friday 01 August]. We established a committee to assess the situation on the ground. The committee will travel to the district tomorrow [Saturday]," he told Addis Standard.
He added that a recent joint report by the Bureau and humanitarian agencies found that 2.45 million people across Tigray were already in need of food aid. But the alarm bells have been ringing for more than a year. In February 2024, Addis Standard reported that the combination of prolonged drought and locust infestation was endangering as much as 91% of Tigray's population, placing them once again at risk of famine.
At the time, the federal Disaster and Risk Management Commission estimated 2.2 million people were affected by drought in the region. However, the then interim administration of Tigray put that number significantly higher, stating that some 4.2 million people, including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, were impacted.
Former interim president Getachew Reda had even drawn parallels to the catastrophic famine of the 1980s, and warned of looming "starvation and death."
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That warning was tragically echoed in data from the Disaster Risk Management Commission of Tigray, whose Commissioner, Gebrehiwot Gebregzabher, told Addis Standard that more than 860 people had died from hunger in the six months leading up to February 2024.
The impact of the crisis has not spared the education sector. Between November and early December 2023, the Tigray interim administration, in collaboration with federal and humanitarian partners, assessed the drought's impact on school-age children.
The findings were grim: 36 districts and 213 villages were severely affected, impacting 625 schools and more than 222,940 students.
While the current suffering in Kolla Tembien is immediate and visible - livestock corpses, failed harvests, swelling bellies - its significance goes far beyond a single district. It serves as a stark reminder that Tigray remains perilously close to a humanitarian abyss, where the two year devastating war, displacement, and neglect induced by internal political fragmentation and heightened tensions with the federal government have created conditions in which drought can once again become deadly.
