The Brief

Flash flooding that began on the night of March 6 has killed at least 66 people across Kenya — half of them in Nairobi — after the Nairobi River burst its banks, displacing more than 200,000 people. In southern Ethiopia, rain-triggered landslides in the Gamo Zone have killed at least 107, with 128 still missing. The disasters arrived weeks after the October–December rainy season failed entirely, leaving nearly 26 million people across East Africa facing extreme hunger.

The Report

Flash floods swept through Nairobi on the night of March 6 after a month’s worth of rainfall fell in 24 hours, bursting the banks of the Nairobi River and inundating low-lying neighbourhoods across the capital. By March 15, Kenya’s National Police Service confirmed 66 dead — 50 men, eight women, and eight children — with 33 of those deaths in Nairobi alone. Victims died primarily from drowning and electrocution. More than 9,000 households have been displaced, 71 vehicles were swept away in Nairobi, and water supply infrastructure was damaged across multiple districts.

A second wave of heavy rain struck on the night of March 14, causing both the Nairobi River and Ngong River to overflow. Water reached two metres deep in the Parklands area. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport diverted flights to Mombasa. Schools were flooded and bridges damaged.

In southern Ethiopia, torrential rains between March 9 and 11 triggered massive landslides across the Gamo Zone, burying villages in the Gacho Baba, Kamba, and Bonke districts. By March 15, 107 bodies had been recovered, with 128 people still reported missing. One survivor was pulled from the mud alive after three days. Ethiopian parliament declared three days of national mourning. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed visited the affected areas, stating that “appropriate studies and work must be carried out to resolve the problem in a sustainable manner.”

The Kenya Red Cross acknowledged that the flooding “caught emergency responders off guard” — despite the Kenya Meteorological Department having issued warnings on February 25 and again in early March. President William Ruto ordered the release of emergency food from national reserves and pledged government coverage of hospital bills for those injured. Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority director-general, Mamo Mamo, told lawmakers that much of Nairobi’s drainage infrastructure dates to the 1970s and was built for a far smaller city.

The floods arrived after months of failed rains. The October–December 2025 rainy season collapsed across the eastern Horn of Africa, pushing nearly 26 million people in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia into extreme hunger. In Somalia, water prices have risen by 2,000 per cent, and 1.4 million livestock died in 2025 alone. A 2024 World Weather Attribution study found that climate change has made devastating rains in the region approximately twice as likely and five per cent more intense — a pattern scientists describe as “climate whiplash,” in which warming temperatures intensify both droughts and the floods that follow them.

The current rains mark the beginning of the March-to-May long rains season. Kenyan authorities have warned of increased risk of waterborne disease from contaminated water and stagnant floodwaters.

The Angle

The phrase “climate whiplash” is precise enough to be useful. Five consecutive failed rainy seasons between 2020 and 2023. A collapsed October–December season in 2025. Then a month of rain in a single night. The same atmospheric system producing drought in northern Kenya and Somalia while dumping water on Nairobi — not in alternation, but simultaneously. What looks contradictory is, as IGAD climate scientist Abdi Noor noted, “part of a broader climate pattern.” The contradiction is only apparent from inside the assumption that weather is supposed to behave locally.

But the weather is not the whole story, and in some respects it is not even the main one. Nairobi’s drainage system was built in the 1970s for a city a fraction of its current size. Informal settlements — Mukuru, Kibra, Mathare — sit on flood-prone land because that is the land that was available to people who were not given a choice. Buildings on riparian corridors block the paths rivers take when they exceed their banks. Concrete replaces soil. The water has nowhere to go, and the people living where it goes have nowhere else to be. When the NEMA director-general tells parliament the infrastructure cannot cope, he is describing a fifty-year accumulation of decisions — each individually small, each individually rational for whoever made it — whose aggregate output is a city that converts rainfall into casualties.

The humanitarian funding numbers complete the picture. Somalia’s 2026 response plan is 13.4 per cent funded. In 2025, less than a third of regional humanitarian requirements were met. The gap between what is needed and what arrives has been widening for years, and it widens fastest precisely when compounding disasters eliminate the recovery time between them. The drought weakened livelihoods, killed livestock, and hardened the soil. The floods arrived on ground that could no longer absorb them, in cities that were never built to manage them, among populations that had already exhausted their reserves. Each failure is legible on its own terms — meteorological, infrastructural, financial. Together they describe something more specific: a region where the interval between crises has become shorter than the time required to recover from them.