EAC ministers adopt El Niño plan naming Kenya's Tana River and coast as hotspots

The East African Community (EAC) adopted a regional El Niño emergency preparedness and response plan on 6 November 2026. It lists the Tana River and Kenyan coast and the Lake Victoria Basin among its priority hotspots, the EAC said in a statement issued from its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania, on 9 November.

The plan was adopted at the ministerial session of an extraordinary meeting of the Joint Sectoral Council on Cooperation in Defence Affairs, Interstate Security and Foreign Policy Coordination. The session was chaired by Rebecca Alitwala Kadaga, Uganda's First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of East African Community Affairs and chairperson of the EAC Council of Ministers.

The plan has five areas: early warning and anticipatory action; health preparedness and response; infrastructure and tourism resilience; agriculture, food security and livelihoods; and climate mobility and displacement. Xinhua reported that the meeting also called for stronger flood-risk management and measures to protect transport corridors.

Besides the Lake Victoria Basin and the Tana River and Kenyan coast, the hotspots are the Juba–Shabelle corridors in Somalia, the Karamoja–Teso cluster, the western highlands of Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar.

The EAC Secretariat is to work with Kenya on a regional information-sharing dashboard on disasters by 25 November 2026 and to develop an implementation plan by 30 November 2026. A Regional Steering Committee chaired by the Deputy Secretary General will oversee the work, supported by an Emergency Coordination Unit at the Secretariat and national focal points in each partner state. UNICEF is already supporting the process and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has committed to work with the region.

The IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) briefed the meeting. “The science leaves no doubt, El Niño is already here,” said Calistus Wachana of ICPAC, adding that “there is a near 100% probability that it will persist through February 2027.” ICPAC said above-normal rainfall is likely across most of the region in October–December, with the strongest signal over eastern Kenya and central to southern Somalia, Tech Review Africa reported.

Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for East African Community Affairs, ASALs and Regional Development, Beatrice Askul Moe, said: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: no Partner State can manage a transboundary shock of this kind alone.” She called for real-time data sharing, faster border clearance for emergency supplies and a humanitarian corridor across the region. “Let our borders be bridges for aid, not barriers,” she said.

Kadaga told the meeting: “This meeting is not routine; it is urgent.” She said the region had learnt “the hard way, from 1997 to 2023–24, that the cost of unpreparedness is always higher than the cost of preparedness.” She also said: “A truck driver in Mombasa should know before he departs whether Malaba is passable.”

“Our Heads of State have directed that we must never again respond as eight separate countries,” Kadaga said.

The EAC Deputy Secretary General in charge of Infrastructure, Productive, Social and Political Sectors, Andrea Aguer Ariik Malueth, said: “A plan on paper does not save lives; implementation does.”

The ministerial session was held on the last day of a five-day extraordinary meeting that ran from 2 to 6 November, the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation reported on 7 November. Daily News in Tanzania reported that senior disaster management officials from the partner states met in Nairobi from 4 November to assess each country's response capacity, identify gaps and develop joint strategies.

Kasper Mmuya, Tanzania's Deputy Minister of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, said Tanzania supports the plan.