Southern Africa: emergency response plan 2019–2020
The devastating drought in Southern Africa has seriously eroded the capacity of affected farming households and communities to produce in the 2019/20 season, which has already started in some countries. There is urgent need to scale up systematic recovery support and invest in resilience building initiatives to address the root causes of rising needs in the region. Without this, food security and nutrition gains made over the past years could rapidly be reversed, requiring even more costly humanitarian actions in the years to come. In the 2018/2019 agricultural season, countries such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe saw their lowest rainfall for nearly 40 years and declared national drought emergencies. Since 2012, the region has only seen two favourable agriculture seasons, with many areas yet to fully recover from the devastating impact of the 2015/16 El Niño event.
