This year’s ”super” El Niño climate will hit women the hardest, the regional director of one of the world’s largest women’s charities has told The Independent in a new interview.
Walter Mwasaa, the regional director for CARE International in East and Southern Africa, also revealed just how significant aid cuts from the US have turned out to be 18 months after they first hit, describing how they, too, have particularly impacted women.
“We should be very worried about the coming super El Niño, and we should absolutely be viewing it as a women’s health problem,” said Mr Mwasaa, who oversees programmes in 12 countries across the region. “As with war, and as with Ebola, it is women in communities who are going to struggle the most. In both rural and urban areas, it is they that will face the biggest health challenges, and also they who bear the burden of taking care of families and households.”
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon triggered by unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which result in regional droughts in some parts of the world, and increased rainfall in others. This year’s event is set to be more severe due to a particularly high forecasted temperature rise, as well as the climate crisis further exacerbating weather patterns.
Across the countries that Mr Mwasaa oversees, Northern countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are set to see an increase in severe rainfall, while those to the South – including Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar – are set to experience intense droughts.
The Independent has previously reported how the super El Niño poses a critical threat to the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers, with global agricultural output projected to take a $342bn (£260bn) hit. Both incomes and food security in the African continent are set to be threatened as a result.
Mr Mwasaa’s belief that women will bear the brunt of these impacts is increasingly supported by research. Climate-induced disasters result in a 40 per cent rise in child marriage in Bangladesh, according to one paper, while droughts in Somaliland are forcing girls into hours-long water walks instead of school. It is well known, too, that depleted household savings post-disaster will typically mean sons’ education are prioritised over that of daughters, while during times of poor harvest, pregnant women and babies continue to require dietary diversity in a way that other members of the community do not.
The Independent has also reported how weather conditions including extreme heat are increasingly becoming major health problems for pregnant women around the world as the climate crisis intensifies.
“Mothers will usually work the hardest to provide food, and she will be allowed less rest, and she will typically eat last,” said Mr Mwasaa. There was a story circulating some time ago, he added, of a woman being forced to give birth in a tree during floods in Mozambique. “At a time when floods like that are coming every couple of years now due to the climate crisis, and health centres across the region are closing, stories like this will become more and more common,” he said.
Climate adaptation is also diverting resources from programmes designed to improve women’s economic opportunities. “What we really want to do is to graduate countries from being dependent on food relief, to supporting them in areas such as accessing markets, education, and improved farming practices,” said Mr Mwasaa. “If we are stuck having to provide emergency relief following climate disasters or spending money on things like climate-resilient seeds, then women and girls will have less opportunities.”
Devastation of aid cuts
The threat to women and girls from the super El Niño also comes at a time when CARE has seen its programming across East and Southern Africa gutted as a result of foreign aid cuts. CARE’s East and Southern Africa budget is expected to fall from around $250m in 2024 to just $140m for the 2027 financial year.
Ethiopia used to have programming worth $130m, he added, but this is only worth $15m in 2027, while the only country to so far receive direct foreign aid from the US for 2027 is Malawi, to the tune of $8m.
In Somalia, some 50 CARE-supported health and nutrition centres have closed since January 2026, at a time when two million children are currently acutely malnourished, including nearly 500,000 suffering from severe acute malnutrition, which is a life-threatening condition. CARE nurses are reporting a sharp influx of pregnant women arriving at remaining health facilities completely exhausted and dehydrated, Mr Mwasaa said, with many having walked for days without food or water seeking care that is no longer guaranteed.
As old sources of funding dwindle, CARE is now working hard to attract private sector partners to programmes, which is a mission that Mr Mwasaa believes can be beneficial to development aims. “It is good for communities to not simply be dependent on aid, and for them to actually try and start engaging in local or even global markets,” he said.
But what is useful in theory is not always realistic in practice. “Development partners, and especially Western governments, are telling us that we now need to find ways of doing business with them, but oftentimes it is hard to find products from rich countries that people in African countries need or can afford,” Mr Mwasaa added.
What does bring Mr Mwasaa hope, is that across the continent he is witnessing pan-African cooperation in a way that previously had been much less common. “We have seen African countries pledge support for each other on Ebola, and national governments are also taking food security much more seriously,” he said. “For me, this is all very exciting, and this kind of ownership is going to be crucial if we are to make development work in the years ahead.”
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
