NAIROBI — An unusually dry March-to-May rainy season across Somalia, eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya has pushed more than 11 million people into acute food insecurity, the United Nations and a coalition of relief agencies said Sunday, warning that the Horn of Africa is on the brink of a fourth consecutive failed rainfall cycle in less than three years.

The Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia, in a joint statement released with the World Food Programme and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, said that cumulative rainfall across the southern Ethiopian lowlands and the Juba and Shabelle basins between March 1 and April 30 stood at between 25 and 40 percent of the long-term average. Pastoral districts in Kenya’s Turkana, Marsabit and Wajir counties had recorded their driest two-month start to the long rains since the satellite record began in 1981.

“The signals we are seeing now — depleted boreholes, livestock body-condition scores collapsing in April rather than July, school dropouts accelerating — these are not the signals of a difficult season. They are the signals of a humanitarian emergency that is already unfolding,” said Halima Yusuf, the WFP’s deputy regional director for Eastern Africa, at a Nairobi press briefing.

Aid agencies said the most acute stress was concentrated in the Somali region of Ethiopia, where an estimated 4.3 million people now require emergency food assistance, and in south-central Somalia, where the figure stood at 3.8 million. In Kenya, the National Drought Management Authority moved 14 of the country’s 23 arid and semi-arid counties into the “alarm” classification last week — its second-highest tier — for the first time since the 2022 emergency.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that 1.9 million people had already been displaced by drought-related stress since January, with movement concentrated along pastoral migration corridors from the Ogaden into Somali-region towns and across the Kenyan border into camps at Dadaab and Kakuma. Both camps, designed in the early 1990s and recently expanded, were running at well over their planned capacity, OCHA said.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development’s Climate Prediction and Applications Centre, in a forecast update issued Friday, said its ensemble models gave only a 22 percent chance of a “normal-to-above-normal” outturn for the remainder of the long rains, which traditionally run through the third week of May. Last year’s October-to-December short rains were also below average across much of the region, the centre noted, and the cumulative deficit had now stripped surface water from approximately 280 of the 470 strategic boreholes monitored across the three-country area.

“The arithmetic is grim,” said Dr. Anthony Murage, a Nairobi-based climate scientist at the centre. “When you stack a weak short-rains season on top of a failed long-rains season, you do not just lose this year’s harvest. You lose the asset base — the herd, the seed stock, the borehole — that families need to recover from the next one. That is the part the food-security numbers do not capture.”

In Mogadishu, Somalia’s federal government activated its national drought response plan on Saturday and appealed for $1.4 billion in emergency support through October. Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre, briefing reporters at Villa Somalia, said the cabinet had approved the immediate redirection of $112 million from infrastructure budgets toward water trucking, supplementary feeding for children under five and emergency veterinary support in the worst-hit districts of Bay, Bakool and Gedo.

“This is not a problem we can solve alone, and it is not a problem caused by anything our people have done,” Barre said. “But it is one we must respond to with every resource we can muster, and we are asking partners to move quickly. The window between now and the start of the dry Hagaa season is narrow.”

International donor response has so far been uneven. The European Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations announced an initial 95 million-euro allocation on Friday and said it expected to release additional tranches in June. The United States Agency for International Development, in a notification to Congress on Thursday, said it would draw on $210 million in unobligated emergency reserve funding for the Horn response, though officials acknowledged that the figure was constrained by competing demands tied to post-war reconstruction in Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

“There is a real fiscal triangulation under way in Washington and Brussels right now between the Iran post-conflict caseload, ongoing Sudan and Sahel needs, and now this,” said Layla Hassan, a humanitarian-finance analyst at the Overseas Development Institute in London. “Donors are not unwilling. They are stretched, and that stretch is showing up in slower pledge fulfillment and in tighter caveats on what funds can be used for.”

The drought has unfolded against a backdrop of broader climatic stress across the wider tropics. South Asia is in the grip of a severe pre-monsoon heatwave, with temperatures in northern India exceeding 46 degrees Celsius last week, while the United States Climate Prediction Center said last month that western Pacific sea-surface temperatures suggested an elevated probability of a return to a La Nina state in the second half of 2026 — a configuration historically associated with worse outcomes in subsequent East African rainy seasons.

Public-health agencies are bracing for a parallel rise in waterborne disease. The World Health Organization’s Africa regional office said cholera case counts in the Somali region of Ethiopia had tripled month-on-month in April, and that nutrition-screening teams in 14 districts were reporting global acute malnutrition rates above 15 percent — the threshold for declaring a nutrition emergency. Measles outbreaks had also been confirmed in displacement sites in Garowe and Kismayo.

In a windswept settlement of plastic-sheeted shelters outside the Ethiopian town of Gode, Asha Mohamed, 41, said she had walked five days with her four children and the surviving six head of her family’s 32-goat herd after wells in her home village ran dry in mid-April. “We waited for the rains as long as we could,” she said through a translator from a WFP staging point. “We could not wait any longer.”

Aid coordinators said additional appeals, including a revised Horn of Africa flash appeal jointly issued by the U.N. and the African Union, would be released in the coming days as field assessments from the Somali and Ethiopian lowlands were consolidated.