Africa’s Greater Horn region is facing a looming polycrisis fueled by conflict, prices, climate and disease

A farmer gathers goat carcasses in drought-hit northeastern Kenya on Jan. 21, 2026. Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images The impacts of a strengthening El Niño and the lingering effects of the war in Iran highlight two separate and seemingly unrelated global hazards. But in the Greater Horn of Africa, an area already beset by prolonged crisis and conflict, these factors are combining with others to potentially create a major, multicountry polycrisis. As experts in famine, conflict and…