By The African Meridian Newsroom | 2 July 2026
JUBA, South Sudan — Over the past month or more, poor rainfall has produced significant moisture deficits and abnormal dryness across a broad swath of East and Central Africa, according to the latest regional seasonal hazards monitoring. Affected areas span central, southwestern and northwestern Ethiopia, South Sudan, eastern Central African Republic, Uganda, western Kenya, and central and northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo — a footprint that cuts across some of the region’s most agriculturally important zones.
Where rainfall deficits have persisted for eight weeks or longer, monitoring agencies have gone a step further and placed southern South Sudan under drought classification, a threshold reserved for longer-term, more entrenched moisture shortfalls rather than a single dry spell. For farming and pastoralist communities in these areas, the distinction matters: an eight-week deficit is long enough to compromise a planting season, stress pasture and water points, and put pressure on herd health well before harvest time would normally arrive.
The pattern is a reminder of how uneven this rainfall season has been across the wider region — with the abnormal dryness described here unfolding at the same time as destructive flooding is being recorded elsewhere on the continent, including in the Sudd wetlands to the immediate west and along West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea coast. Climate monitors say that kind of simultaneous extremes, too dry in some places and too wet in others within the same season, has become an increasingly common feature of recent years.
Agencies tracking the situation say the coming weeks of rainfall will be decisive in determining whether the dryness deepens further or begins to ease, particularly for southern South Sudan, where the drought classification will be reassessed as new rainfall data comes in.