Water / Short term

Emergency Drought Response

Rapid, life-saving water during acute drought. Across the 2022 and 2025 droughts we trucked water across six regions of Somaliland, reaching around 66,000 households and more than 700,000 livestock.

Water trucking during the 2025 drought response, Somaliland.

Water trucking during the 2025 drought response, Somaliland.

Introduction

First-mover response when drought hits hardest.

As a privately funded organisation, we can act within days when communities are under acute pressure, working at the request of and alongside government.

In July 2025, at the government’s request, our Somaliland teams deployed 1,000 trucks of water to the most remote and conflict-affected areas, each carrying roughly 7,000 to 9,000 litres, enough for hundreds of families and their livestock. Teams camped overnight in villages and braved treacherous roads to get water through, the second such mobilisation in three years.

66,000
Households reached
700k+
Livestock supported
1,000
Trucks, July 2025
6
Regions covered
The problem

Drought is now structural, not cyclical.

Somaliland runs on livestock: more than 60% of GDP and 70% of its people depend on it. But the rains are increasingly unpredictable, the second (Deyr) rainy season is drying, and rising heat accelerates evaporation. A sharp decline from 2019 culminated in the severe 2022 drought, and scientists estimate climate change has made such droughts roughly 100 times more likely. When a season fails, herds die, harvests fail and incomes collapse.

Impact

Our impact

From the 2022 and 2025 emergency drought responses.

66,000
Households reached across the 2022 and 2025 droughts, with 700,000+ livestock.
~4$/litre
Delivery cost as local prices doubled and weak donkeys made transport prohibitive.
80%
Of households surveyed at the time we delivered, had no other support.
What we've learnt

What we learnt

01

Independence enables speed.

Private funding lets us act within days, 80% of the households we reached had received no other support at the time.

02

Relief is not a strategy.

Trucking saves lives but is costly; it catalysed our shift toward dams, monitoring and system-level resilience.

03

Measure even in a crisis.

Collecting live data during the 2025 response turned anecdotes into evidence on livestock losses, water prices and reach.

Engage

Support emergency response.

Partnership, co-funding and operator enquiries start here.