As part of an ongoing relief effort IOM Ethiopia is providing drought affected families with Emergency Shelter and Non-Food Item (ES/NFI) kits. IOM’s Displacement tracking and analysis is providing emergency actors with critical insight into the multi-sectoral humanitarian and protection needs of displaced persons and host communities. Continued strengthening of inter-cluster mechanisms for sharing of displacement information and subsequent incorporation into humanitarian response planning is essential, to ensure an accurate picture of the multi-sectoral needs of displaced persons and host communities is regularly available to emergency actors.

Host communities continue to demonstrate extraordinary resilience in their accommodation of newly displaced families, despite also being severely impacted by the drought. In order to ensure that the good will extended by host communities to displaced persons does not become a point of tension, the humanitarian response to the drought must adequately address the multi-sectoral needs of both displaced persons and host communities.

Unless immediate and sustained ES/NFI assistance is secured, affected populations will continue to be critically exposed to the harsh effects of the El Nino climatic phenomenon, unable to meet their household needs and further strain the limited resources of host communities.