In 1997, I was a young boy in Ifo, one of the refugee camps that make up Dadaab in northeastern Kenya, when the El Niño rains came.
Dadaab felt like the middle of nowhere then, not only geographically but in almost every sense that mattered. Infrastructure was extremely limited. Roads were poor. When the rains intensified, even those fragile connections disappeared beneath water and mud. The ground that normally carried people, food and supplies became almost impassable. For refugees like us, isolation was not an inconvenience. It could mean hunger. It could mean medicine not arriving. It could mean essential supplies being unable to reach a population that was already dependent on assistance. I did not understand any of this in the language I use today. I knew nothing about disaster risk reduction, anticipatory action or resilience. I was simply a child watching the world around me change.
The historical record confirms the scale of what happened. Heavy rains and flooding beginning in late 1997 devastated Dadaab's infrastructure and cut the camps off by road from the rest of Kenya for almost three months. Food and other essential supplies eventually had to be transported by air. UNHCR later described how the El Niño floods washed away road links and left refugees dependent on air deliveries of food, medicine and fuel for months.
But I do not need a report to remember the aeroplanes. I remember being a half-naked little boy, barefoot, running dangerously beneath the belly of an aircraft as it passed overhead, watching huge sacks of food fall from the sky. I did not understand the extraordinary logistics required to get that food to us. I only understood that something we desperately needed was finally arriving. For a child, it almost seemed as though food were falling from heaven.
Nearly thirty years later, I think about that memory differently. I am grateful the aeroplane came. Humanitarian response saves lives, and when communities are trapped by disaster, the immediate priority must always be survival. But I now find myself asking a different question.
If another El Niño of that magnitude arrived today, would we be ready? Or would we once again be surprised?
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That question reaches far beyond Dadaab. Across Africa, we have become remarkably familiar with emergencies. Drought comes and appeals are launched. Floods arrive and roads disappear. Conflict displaces communities and temporary settlements emerge. Food insecurity worsens and emergency programmes expand. Governments and humanitarian organisations mobilise, often heroically. Then the immediate danger recedes and recovery begins. But what happens before the next crisis?
This is why I have become increasingly interested in a simple but powerful way of thinking about development: response, recovery and resilience. Response saves lives during the emergency. Recovery helps communities restore what was lost. Resilience asks the harder question: when the shock returns, will it cause the same devastation? Africa has become reasonably experienced at the first two. The third deserves far greater attention.
The distinction matters because many of the shocks confronting the continent are not entirely unpredictable. We may not know precisely when the next drought will become severe, where the heaviest rain will fall or which community will suffer most. But drought in the Horn of Africa is not new. Flooding in East Africa is not new. Neither are displacement, food insecurity or the vulnerability created when conflict and climatic shocks collide. We know enough to know that they will return.
Indeed, the question is no longer theoretical. During the 2023-24 El Niño period, heavy rains and severe flooding again struck the Horn of Africa. In November 2023, flooding affected nearly 25,000 people in the Dadaab camps. By the following April and early May, UNHCR estimated that more than 20,000 people there had been displaced from their shelters, with families again moving toward schools, relatives and higher ground. That does not mean nothing has changed since 1997. Much has. Nor would it be fair to pretend governments, humanitarian agencies and communities have learned nothing. Disaster forecasting is better. Communications are better. Institutions and humanitarian systems have evolved. But that is precisely why the question of preparedness has become more demanding. In 1997, perhaps we could say we were caught unprepared. Nearly three decades later, surprise is a less convincing explanation.
We increasingly know when rainfall patterns are becoming dangerous. We can identify flood-prone areas. We know which communities have weak roads, fragile water systems and limited access to health services. We know that families already weakened by drought, displacement or poverty will be hit harder by the next shock. The problem is often not simply knowing. It is turning knowledge into action before the emergency. An early warning that produces no early action is merely an accurate prediction of suffering. This is where resilience must become more than a fashionable word in development reports.
Resilience does not mean preventing rain, drought or conflict. No government can eliminate every shock. It means building societies capable of absorbing shocks without allowing them to become catastrophes. That may mean roads designed with known flood risks in mind. It means drainage and water infrastructure that can withstand extremes. It means local authorities with contingency plans and resources they can actually deploy. It means social protection systems capable of reaching vulnerable families before they lose everything. It means emergency financing that can be released when warning indicators appear rather than months after a crisis has become visible to the world. And above all, it means institutions capable of acting. That is why resilience is not merely a humanitarian issue. It is a question of development and state capacity.
We often praise Africans for their resilience. Refugees are called resilient. Farmers who survive repeated droughts are resilient. Families who rebuild after floods are resilient. Communities that absorb displaced populations are resilient. There is truth in that admiration. I witnessed such resilience growing up. But we should be careful about what we celebrate. There is a difference between resilience and being forced to survive institutional weakness.
A mother walking farther for water because a system has failed is adapting, but that should not absolve the system. A family rebuilding the same fragile home after another flood may demonstrate remarkable determination, but determination is not infrastructure. A refugee child running beneath an aircraft for food may survive, but survival should never become our development model. Africa's people have demonstrated extraordinary resilience. The challenge now is for African institutions to demonstrate the same. That requires changing how we measure success after a crisis.
The question cannot end with how many tonnes of food were distributed, how many shelters were rebuilt or how quickly a damaged road reopened. Those things matter enormously during response and recovery. But there should be another question: What will happen here when the shock returns? If we reconstruct a road after every flood but it repeatedly disappears beneath the next one, we are financing recovery without financing resilience. If emergency food reaches the same vulnerable communities after every drought while the conditions producing their vulnerability remain unchanged, we are saving lives, but not sufficiently changing their prospects. A country that repeatedly recovers from crisis but remains equally vulnerable to the next one has rebuilt. It has not necessarily developed.
Development institutions also have a role in changing this logic. Humanitarian response and long-term development are too often treated as separate worlds: one responds to today's emergency while the other plans tomorrow's projects. For the family experiencing the crisis, there is no such separation. The road washed away by a flood is simultaneously a humanitarian problem and a development problem. The water system that fails during drought is both. So is the clinic that cannot function during an emergency, the household pushed into destitution after losing its livestock, or the local government unable to act despite receiving an early warning. Response should therefore contain the beginnings of recovery, and recovery should contain the foundations of resilience.
That does not mean every humanitarian intervention must solve decades of underdevelopment. Emergency workers cannot rebuild a state while distributing food after a flood. But our broader institutions should stop returning communities to precisely the same vulnerability that existed before the emergency. The goal should not simply be to rebuild. It should be to rebuild differently.
I sometimes return in my mind to that aeroplane over Ifo. As a boy, I saw its arrival as salvation. And in that moment, it was. I remain grateful to the people and organisations that found a way to reach communities that the roads could no longer reach. But nearly thirty years later, I see another meaning in that memory. The ultimate achievement of development is not becoming better at sending the aeroplane after the road disappears. It is building the road that can withstand the rain, creating institutions that act on the warning, financing preparedness before catastrophe and protecting families before hunger begins.
Response will always be necessary. Recovery will always matter. Some disasters will overwhelm even well-prepared societies. But resilience asks us to learn. The rain will come again. Drought will come again. Africa will face crises we can predict and others we cannot.
In 1997, I was a little boy running beneath an aeroplane because a disaster had cut us off from the world. If the same kind of shock comes tomorrow, the question after nearly thirty years of development cannot simply be whether we are capable of responding again. It is whether we will still be surprised.
The writer is a Geopolitical Analyst and International Development Professional. abdidool@gmail.com