A Makerere University needs assessment of 106 frontline personnel across the PASSAGE project landscape, supported by IDRC-Canada and led by IGAD
By Anthony Egeru and Gordon Yofesi Mwesigwa – Department of Environmental Management, Makerere University
A new needs assessment conducted by Makerere University is offering the clearest picture yet of who actually stands between the Greater Horn of Africa’s pastoral communities and the next drought, flood or disease outbreak — and the answer, worryingly, is a workforce facing an escalating threat that shows little sign of slowing down.
The survey, carried out under PASSAGE — Strengthening Pastoralist Livelihoods in the African Greater Horn through Effective Anticipatory Action, a project funded by IDRC-Canada and led by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) — gathered responses from 106 frontline personnel across five of the region’s most climate-vulnerable, transboundary landscapes. Its purpose is deceptively modest: to find out what capacities Makerere needs to build among the people already doing anticipatory-action work, ahead of the next stage of the project. Its findings say something much bigger about the scale of the challenge that work is up against.
Who is on the frontline?
Nearly half of respondents (48%) work in Uganda’s Karamoja sub-region, with the remainder spread across Turkana and Marsabit in Kenya, the Borana zone of Ethiopia’s Oromia region, South Sudan’s Equatorial States, and Mandera in Somalia — several organisations reported operating across two or more of these borders at once, a reminder that pastoralist life in this landscape rarely respects a map.
The people doing this work are overwhelmingly male: 83% of respondents identified as male against 16% female, a gender gap the survey’s authors will need to reckon with as PASSAGE moves toward designing training and knowledge-sharing “hubs” meant to reach the full breadth of pastoral society, not just its most visible representatives. They are also highly credentialed — three in four hold a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, and roughly one in ten holds a doctorate — pointing to a survey population drawn from technical, professional and government roles rather than pastoralists themselves. NGO and civil-society staff make up the largest single group by role (42 mentions), followed by civil servants, agricultural and veterinary extension workers, and community educators, while national NGOs and local government bodies together account for two in five of the organisations represented.
Asked what their organisations actually do, respondents most commonly cited climate change adaptation and mitigation, livestock management support, capacity building and community development. Encouragingly for PASSAGE’s core mission, functions directly tied to anticipatory action — early warning information dissemination and climate risk assessment — were already reported by a third to two-fifths of organisations, suggesting the project has a real institutional base to build on rather than starting from zero.
Drought, and then everything else
It is the survey’s second half, on climate hazards themselves, that delivers the sharpest signal. Asked to rate how common six major hazards are in the communities they serve, respondents were nearly unanimous on one point: drought is the defining threat of this landscape. More than nine in ten (90.6%) rated drought as a high or very high risk, with two-thirds calling it very high outright — the highest score of any hazard, on any question, in the entire survey.
Nothing else comes close, but nothing else is far behind either. Livestock disease affects 84% of communities at a high level, water stress 81%, and heat stress 77%. Floods (63%) and invasive species (53%) round out the list — still substantial burdens, but ones that roughly half to two-thirds of respondents contend with, rather than the near-universal reach of drought and disease.
The trend data makes the picture more urgent still. Asked whether each hazard is getting worse, better or staying erratic, respondents again pointed overwhelmingly to drought: 77% say it is increasing, more than any other hazard’s upward trend. Water stress (72% increasing) and heat stress (69%) are moving the same direction. Floods stand apart for a different reason — only 46% describe a straightforward increasing trend, while a further 26% call flood patterns “erratic,” a distinction that matters enormously for anticipatory action planning. A warning system built to detect steadily worsening conditions is poorly suited to a hazard that behaves unpredictably from one season to the next.
Perhaps the most reassuring finding is that current response effort largely tracks where the danger actually is. Drought absorbs the largest share of intervention resources for 90% of respondents — almost exactly matching its 91% prevalence score, evidence that programming is not badly misallocated at the aggregate level. Water stress and livestock disease follow similarly matched patterns. The one hazard that stands out as disproportionate is invasive species: despite ranking last in prevalence, it still draws meaningful response effort from half of respondents, a mismatch worth further investigation as PASSAGE refines where its resources go.
What it means for anticipatory action
None of this will surprise anyone who has worked in the Greater Horn’s drylands for long. But surveys like this one matter precisely because anticipatory action — the whole premise PASSAGE is built on — depends on turning what frontline workers already know into forecasts, plans and triggers that move fast enough to matter. IDRC and IGAD’s project was founded on the observation that this region’s crises are usually well forecast and badly acted upon; a needs assessment that confirms drought’s overwhelming dominance, flags floods’ unpredictability, and maps exactly which institutions are already doing early-warning work is the first concrete step toward closing that gap, rather than simply describing it again.
The next phase, Makerere’s researchers say, is to turn this baseline into targeted capacity-building — starting with the frontline workers this survey has just identified, in the places where drought, disease and water stress are already reshaping pastoral life faster than the systems meant to warn people about it.
