Mekelle – At least 22 people have died and over 27,000 livestock have perished in Kolla Tembien, Central Tigray, as a prolonged drought tightens its grip on the war-affected region, local officials told Addis Standard. The death toll underscores the growing scale of a humanitarian emergency unfolding with little external intervention.
“People are already dying. We are helpless without urgent support,” said Goitom Gebrehaweria, a local administrator in the Yaqer locality, adding that families are running out of food and water as the situation becomes increasingly desperate.
Last week, Addis Standard reported that more than 18,000 livestock had already died due to failed rains. Since then, the toll has surged, devastating rural livelihoods. Hundreds of hectares of farmland – especially sesame fields, a vital crop in the region – have withered under the sun. Health workers are warning of an alarming spike in acute malnutrition, particularly among children and the elderly.
Gebrehiwet Gebregzabher, head of the Tigray Regional Disaster Risk Management Bureau, told Addis Standard last week that his office received formal notification from the district about the crisis. “Officials from the district were here [in Mekelle] with us today [Friday, 01 August]. We established a committee to assess the situation on the ground. The committee will travel to the district tomorrow [Saturday],” he said.
On Monday, 04 August, the Cabinet of the Tigray Interim Regional Administration (TIRA) held an emergency session to discuss the unfolding crisis and agreed on the urgent need to deliver aid.
However, local officials say that despite repeated appeals, no emergency assistance has reached Kolla Tembien to date.
Gebrehiwet noted that a recent joint report by the Bureau and humanitarian agencies found that 2.45 million people across Tigray were already in need of food aid. But the alarm bells have been ringing for more than a year. In February 2024, Addis Standard reported that the combination of prolonged drought and locust infestation was endangering as much as 91% of Tigray’s population, placing them once again at risk of famine.
At the time, the federal Disaster and Risk Management Commission estimated 2.2 million people were affected by drought in the region. However, the then interim administration of Tigray put that number significantly higher, stating that some 4.2 million people, including hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, were impacted.
Former interim president Getachew Reda had even drawn parallels to the catastrophic famine of the 1980s, and warned of looming “starvation and death.”
That warning was tragically echoed in data from the Disaster Risk Management Commission of Tigray, whose Commissioner, Gebrehiwot Gebregzabher, told Addis Standard that more than 860 people had died from hunger in the six months leading up to February 2024.
The impact of the crisis has not spared the education sector. Between November and early December 2023, the Tigray interim administration, in collaboration with federal and humanitarian partners, assessed the drought’s impact on school-age children.
The findings were grim: 36 districts and 213 villages were severely affected, impacting 625 schools and more than 222,940 students.
While the current suffering in Kolla Tembien is immediate and visible – livestock corpses, failed harvests, swelling bellies – its significance goes far beyond a single district. It serves as a stark reminder that Tigray remains perilously close to a humanitarian abyss, where the two year devastating war, displacement, and neglect induced by internal political fragmentation and heightened tensions with the federal government have created conditions in which drought can once again become deadly.
