By Magdalene Wanja - Reporter
Somalia, 18 August 2026 - The rain does not arrive gently in northern Somalia. It comes as a rush of water over bare, hardened earth, carving jagged gullies and carrying what little topsoil remains out to sea.
Once, ancient acacia trees anchored the land, guiding migration routes and holding the soil in place.
Today, they are gone, felled for a charcoal trade that fed foreign markets while the ground beneath quietly died. This is what collapse looks like when no one is watching.
In 1991, as Somalia’s state disintegrated and the world’s attention shifted to war and famine, Fatima Jibrell was watching.
Born into a nomadic pastoralist family in Sanaag, she understood what distant policymakers could not: when the trees disappear, everything built upon them follows, livelihoods, water, and stability. She did not wait for a global framework.
Instead, she organised peace marches across clan divisions, trained youth to carry the message into remote rangelands, and spent a decade lobbying the Puntland government until, in 2000, it banned charcoal exports.
Enforcement of that ban cut exports by 80 percent. For her work, she received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002 and was later named a UNEP Champion of the Earth.
Yet outside the development sector, her name is barely known. That is the first problem this story examines. The second is much larger.
Billions of dollars are now committed to climate action and resilience. Governments, multilateral institutions, and foundations are deploying capital at unprecedented scale.
However, the structure of that spending closely resembles the development models that failed before it: designed far from affected regions, channeled through layers of intermediaries, and evaluated using metrics disconnected from lived reality. Global climate finance reached an estimated $1.3 trillion in 2021–2022.
Just over 2% reached the world’s least developed countries, including those facing the most severe climate impacts across the Horn of Africa.
“The funding exists,” says Degan Ali, Jibrell’s daughter and Adeso’s current Executive Director.
“But it is absorbed by institutions far removed from the communities on the frontlines.”
For pastoralist communities, the consequences are not theoretical. Droughts are more frequent and more severe, each one triggering a humanitarian emergency treated as a discrete event rather than a symptom of deeper failure: the systematic exclusion of local knowledge from climate strategy.
These communities are not passive victims. For generations, they have tracked rainfall, managed water scarcity, and adapted grazing patterns in ways no international early warning system can replicate.
In 2003, Adeso’s camel caravan network identified a severe drought months before international indicators did.
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“Community intelligence is faster, cheaper, and more accurate than satellite data,” one elder explained. “But nobody funds it.”
Adeso’s work is not a pilot project. It represents more than 35 years of demonstrated outcomes showing that local authority over land and resources delivers results that top-down interventions rarely do.
When Jibrell led the campaign against charcoal exports, she built coalitions across clan lines and organized community enforcement.
When water scarcity threatened survival, Adeso worked with residents to build simple rock dams from local stone, slowing runoff just enough for soil regeneration. When coastal fisheries collapsed under pressure from illegal foreign trawlers, shoreline communities restored mangroves, guided by their own understanding of tides and salinity.
Each intervention is grounded in the same principle: the people closest to the land already hold the solutions. The role of an organisation is to resource and amplify that knowledge, not replace it.
Now, under Ali’s leadership, Adeso is pushing that logic further. The Proximate Fund, a Pan-African philanthropic initiative, is designed to route resources directly to civil society organisations, social enterprises, and community networks across Africa, bypassing the intermediary architecture that currently absorbs most international funding. Its defining feature is flexibility.
Funding is not siloed into humanitarian categories or climate buckets. Communities receive unrestricted capital and determine their own priorities because drought, food insecurity, and land degradation are not separate problems.
In Sudan, the pilot program is funding cooperatives, small enterprises, and agricultural value chains alongside humanitarian support.
“This is what system change looks like from the ground up,” Ali said. “We are refusing to stop at emergency response.”
Somalia’s humanitarian appeals have run at over a billion dollars annually for decades, rising from $1.09 billion in 2021 to $2.27 billion in 2022. Yet the emergency is treated as an emergency rather than the predictable consequence of degraded land.
A USAID study found that every $1 invested in resilience generates $3 or more in reduced humanitarian assistance needs.
“Spending billions on emergency response, year after year, drought after drought, is not only ineffective,” Ali emphasized.
“It is more expensive than fixing the root problem.”
The climate crisis in the Horn of Africa is not waiting for donors to figure it out. Pastoralist communities already know how to adapt, survive, and restore. What they lack is direct investment.
As Jibrell once said: “If you want to save Somalia, save the trees. Everything else will follow.”