El Niño 2026-2027: Livelihood and Community Impacts in East and West Africa

The 2026-2027 El Niño is making headlines as a “Godzilla” event of “record-shattering intensity” bringing “vengeance” and “hunger” for millions. Nuru’s supporters have been asking us how this extreme swing in a regular climate cycle impacts the communities we serve in East and West Africa. Drawing on first-hand reports from across the Nuru Collective, we explore the science and local implications that reach far beyond the weather.

What is El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)?

In June 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared the official arrival of a rapidly strengthening El Niño, a powerful climate pattern expected to persist until February–March 2027 (NOAA). El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate system that alters global rainfall and temperature patterns. El Niño increases the incidence and severity of droughts, floods, heatwaves, epidemic outbreaks, wildfires and hurricanes. 

While El Niño is a global meteorological phenomenon, its severe consequences are felt most acutely on the ground by smallholder farming families in Sub-Saharan Africa who live on the frontlines of climate change. Disruptive setbacks in crop yields, food security, and agricultural income from climate events trigger devastating household crises from which economic recovery can take years without support structures in place. 

Matt Lineal harvests with a farmer in Burkina Faso, 2025

How Does El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impact the globe?  

The 2026-2027 El Niño has a massive scale. It is placing 2.2 billion people–more than a quarter of the global population––at high risk for severe heat stress (Washington Post). Economic forecasts project global economic losses from this one-year (2026-2027) event to have staggering impacts. Taking history as our teacher, researchers attribute $5.7 trillion in global income losses to the 1997-98 El Niño event. Among the over 400 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa who rely on smallholder and rain-fed agriculture, about half of them are directly exposed to El Niño. The impacts are outsized for smallholder farmers in conditions of vulnerability, raising the stakes with the potential to immediately push an additional 49 million people into acute hunger (UN). 

ENSO is a Threat Multiplier

ENSO and its impacts do not occur in isolation. Smallholder households are already navigating conflict, inflation, high food prices, and the persistent effects of previous climate shocks. The central concern is not simply whether rainfall will be above or below normal, but whether households, agribusinesses, and local economies have the resilience to absorb another period of climate volatility without losing productive assets, food security, income, or their ability to recover. 

Better understanding our climate helps us cope with weather fluctuations and livelihood impacts, while mitigating potential risks. To understand what lies ahead, we must examine the patterns of ENSO, the cyclical pattern of Pacific Ocean temperatures and winds. The 2026–2027 event is projected to be one of the strongest since modern climate science data collection began in 1950. Recent analysis digs even further to a super El Niño in 1877, with documented catastrophic crop failure in India and Southeast Asia, resulting in widespread famine that killed tens of millions of people. While a similar famine is not suggested today, we live in a warmer world with substantial vulnerable populations exposed to natural disasters that may be exacerbated by these impacts. The massive amount of extra heat and energy being pushed into the atmosphere means 2027 is virtually guaranteed to be the hottest year on record. A major complication for 2026 is the simultaneous emergence of a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)—a related water temperature shift in the Indian Ocean. When these two climate patterns happen at once, they interact to substantially increase the occurrence of extreme rainfall and flooding, particularly in East Africa (NOAA).

How is El Niño Impacting West and East Africa?

The consequences of these climate anomalies are already manifesting across Nuru’s geographies in East and West Africa. So far in 2026, Nuru-supported farmers in West Africa have been forced to delay planting crops. In Nuru’s Resilience Corridor geographies of Burkina Faso, northern parts of Ghana, Togo, and Benin, and southwest Niger, the July–September rainy season is experiencing highly erratic rainfall distribution and heat stress. This compromises main-season cereals and deteriorates pasture for livestock.

In East Africa, there has been a disruption in the normal rainy period with impacts on crops in the middle of their growth cycle. Ethiopia experienced its driest June–July on record, disrupting the vital Kiremt rains that support the nation’s primary Meher harvest. This unseasonably dry period has delayed and staggered planting opportunities, causing extreme crop moisture stress and a projected production deficit in staple food basket regions. Beyond immediate crop failures, this delay weakens agricultural labor demand, decreasing vital household income. 

Meanwhile, portions of Kenya have suffered dry spells that damaged harvest outlooks in the most productive regions, resulting in IPC phase III crisis outcomes in the arid and semi-arid northern counties. Transitioning into the October–December period, the combined positive IOD and El Niño are expected to bring torrential rains and severe flooding to the eastern Horn of Africa. These floods risk displacing families, destroying remaining crops, and triggering cholera, malaria, and Rift Valley fever outbreaks (FEWS NET).

Photo Credit: FEWS NET

Compounding Vulnerabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa 

The relationship between local production and global markets is a volatile cycle for smallholder farmers. Poor weather, unpredictable climate, high production costs, and high prices all threaten the food and income security of smallholder farming families in Sub-Saharan Africa. Weather and climate are parts of the overall equation. Even before the start of the 2026 season, farmers faced high costs of production, an unpredictable market outlook, and abnormally expensive basic commodities. 

Markets, production, and consumption have a dynamic and interconnected relationship. Unpredictability is disrupting all three elements, meaning that individuals face unexpectedly high prices, punctuated income shortfalls, and deficits of food in the market. Normally, if any one of these legs falls out, farmers can adapt. If prices are high, farmers eat food from their own field. If a farmer’s own production fails, they can turn to day labor to buy food from the market. When food is expensive, a farmer’s own crops fail, and the supply of basic commodities from global markets also becomes scarce, there is little reprieve. Hunger sets in. Taken to its extreme, this may lead to desperation and extreme coping measures, such as selling off land and productive assets, or becoming climate and economic refugees. 

What makes this year exceptionally dangerous is its intersection with record-high temperatures and the global fuel and fertilizer crisis linked to conflict in the Middle East, threatening to push tens of millions into acute hunger (Council on Foreign Relations). Inflationary pressures on both basic commodities and staple foods throughout the 2020s have not eased in Sub-Saharan Africa. Amid these daunting challenges, Nuru actively supports locally-led climate resilience to help agribusiness members regain agency and adapt to these shocks.

Photo Credit: ACAPS

Nuru’s Response to the 2026-2027 El Niño

At Nuru, we monitor, manage, and mitigate the impacts of these cyclical climate patterns. We detailed these specific threats during the historic 2015 event in our post on the effects of El Niño in East Africa and tracked the subsequent compounding impacts of drought in our update on the effects of La Niña in East and West Africa. As our global community faces another strong ENSO cycle, equipping smallholder farmers and their communities to navigate these shocks is a global imperative to save lives and build long-term resilience. 

Nuru strengthens community climate resilience by reducing climate risks through adaptive measures that improve farmers’ ability to anticipate and respond to climate variability. Nuru’s approach delivers climate-smart agricultural extension training throughout each farming season via Nuru-supported agribusinesses. To protect smallholder farmers from skyrocketing input costs, Nuru further works through farmer agribusinesses to provide high-quality seeds and balanced fertilizers on credit. 

Five Tools in Nuru’s Climate Resilience Toolkit

• Resilient crop production practices include activities like distributing climate-resilient seeds (seeds that can withstand either droughts or heavy rainfall) and supportive crop inputs such as fertilizer that supports strong crop and root development to withstand too much or too little precipitation. Nuru supports farmers to plant on time, with a shift to shorter maturity crops, reducing the dependence on long periods of stable weather patterns. For instance, Nuru Ethiopia promotes short-maturity, drought-tolerant mung beans.
• In partnership with ignitia, Nuru ensures farmers can access hyper-local weather forecasts. Timely, localized forecasts inform decisions on planting, weeding, and harvesting as weather patterns become less predictable. These daily, weekly, and monthly forecasts are broadcast via SMS text messages in local languages to farmers in East and West Africa, providing the precise data needed to optimize farming activities.
• Risk is an inherent part of smallholder farming. Nuru promotes prudent risk-taking by promoting crop production based on best practices and strong financial modeling. “Do no harm” is a foundational principle in our work and interventions. Nuru works to reduce the overall risk exposure for farmers, promoting savings behaviors that equip them to make the most of strong harvests and plan ahead for difficult times.
• Planting trees, a Nature-based Solution, improves soil health, controls erosion, provides landslide stability, and creates shade to reduce drought stress on crops. Furthermore, trees are planted for agroforestry purposes, providing farmers with an alternate income source as well as food and animal feed sources.
• Livelihood diversification is critical to increasing farmers’ incomes and equipping them to adapt in the face of a changing climate. As an example, Nuru Kenya helps farmers diversify into beekeeping, dairy, and livestock livelihoods to secure alternative income streams. Nuru trains agribusinesses on climate-smart agriculture practices that promote soil health through composting to replenish soil nutrients and mulching to prevent soil evaporation. Techniques, inputs, and best practices are adapted and customized to fit local environmental and cultural contexts. As an example, Nuru Nigeria employs soil testing to rightsize and tailor soybean input packages.

Nuru Nigeria staff collecting soil samples for evaluation, 2024

Designing and Deploying Durability: An Invitation to be Part of the Solution

Nuru prioritizes ongoing research and development, ensuring the most innovative solutions help farmers and agribusinesses survive and thrive despite increasingly unpredictable and challenging environmental, social, and economic challenges. We believe in holistic risk management: 1) risk reduction, 2) prudent risk-taking, 3) risk reserves, and 4) risk transfer. Rural livelihoods are inherently risky business. Risk reduction, actively identifying and avoiding taking unnecessary risks, is a cornerstone of facing this reality. In equal measure, however, Nuru also promotes increasing livelihoods investment as prudent risk-taking. This means farmers accept risk-taking as intrinsic to their livelihoods. Farmers build risk reserves (savings) as a throughline for both thick and thin times. 

In response to the 2026-2027 El Niño, we’re actively exploring two potential additions to our holistic risk management approach. These risk transfer options would allow risk to be transferred to a third-party through pooling mechanisms, decreasing risk for disconnected, remote rural populations.

• Grants and zero-interest loan options enable replanting and rapid recovery: Highly concessional post-harvest finance with a widespread geographic coverage pools risk can concentrate recovery finance where it’s needed most. Put simply, risk-pooling ensures financial risks are spread out rather than carried by one single agribusiness. Our goal is that farmers don’t miss a season, their families don’t miss a meal, and their agribusinesses stay on track. We’ve learned that if we act prudently, we can support farmers to still achieve their goals and partially mitigate revenue shortfalls, without creating long-term philanthropic dependency. In other words, in a strong El Niño year, we cannot allow perfection to be the enemy of good. Left unsatiated, hunger turns to desperation.
• Insurance, including index-based options (i.e. insurance that offers payouts based on shared measurements, such as regional crop failure or low rainfall), may offer affordable, trusted, locally appropriate, and accessible risk transfer for smallholder farmers: Our priority is affordability, simplicity, value, and trust. Agribusinesses join together members to decrease the costs of doing business. Buying in bulk decreases transaction costs. The same efficiency applies to insurance. By increasing the risk pool (the entire agribusiness versus individual farmers) the costs of insurance design and management are distributed, and the overall geographic risk pool is spread out. This means that one contract can insure hundreds of farms, versus having to sign on hundreds of farmers separately. At the same time, the wider geographic area lowers and distributes the risk of a triggering event in any one location. In the event of catastrophic risks that impact entire regions and countries, these are also covered and underwritten by global reinsurance.

The above solutions are proposed features of an expanded response toolkit that we will continue to evaluate as we monitor the season.

Nuru-supported tree nursery. Photo Credit: Dr. Matthew Aghai

Sustaining the ongoing support that we provide to rural communities through agribusinesses means seeing the season through with focus now and an eye on the future. This means managing and mitigating risk holistically, diversifying livelihoods, and providing timely advice and updates through extension and weather advisory services. Nuru aims to take its support one step further by integrating these financial innovations to begin meaningfully de-risking investment opportunities in these marginalized, remote communities. With support from our partners, we strive to be at the forefront in delivering the additional support needed to these communities amid unprecedented challenges.  Smallholder farmers and agribusinesses deserve access to the capital they need to recover and reinvest in productive assets after a shock, without facing the burden of unsustainable debt. As climate shocks grow more frequent and severe, smallholder farmers who feed their nations cannot take on these challenges alone; assisting them is a global imperative. We are actively seeking partnerships to support this approach–an approach that will secure the vital food systems that feed the world.

To learn more about Nuru’s work and how you can get involved as the 2026-2027 El Niño continues:

• Subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates and local stories about climate adaptation.
• Learn about Nuru’s partnership with Viridian and how tree planting supports sustainable agribusinesses.
• Connect with Nuru’s Chief Sustainability Officer to learn about partnership opportunities with Nuru.