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Before the water rises

A photo essay from Beledweyne, Somalia

In Beledweyne, everything starts with the river. The Shabelle river is why the town exists where it does: it waters the farms and fills the wells. It is also what everyone here is quietly watching, almost three years after the last major flood.

This year, forecasters expect a strong El Niño to bring heavy rains to the Ethiopian highlands upstream. That water has to go somewhere. In 2023, it went through Beledweyne, affecting some 200,000 people. This year, people who live along the river are bracing for something possibly worse.

We spent a week in Beledweyne meeting the people who will be first to feel it: a government official who tracks the river for a living, a farmer who has already lost one harvest to these waters, and a woman who lived through the last flood and is trying to imagine the next one. This is what they told us.

The river, measured in memory

We met an employee of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management whose job is to watch the water. Today, the river is low, placid, almost unremarkable. He pointed up, past where we were standing, to a mark near the top of the bridge. That, he said, is roughly how high it reached during the last El Niño.

It is a strange thing to stand beside a dry riverbed and be shown, with a simple gesture upward, the exact shape of a disaster that has not happened yet.

A farm rebuilt and a wall that may not be enough

Mohammed lost more than 200 fruit trees in the 2023 floods. Since then, he has rebuilt: a working irrigation system, and a wall along the riverbank to hold back the next flood. Careful, hard-won work that may not be enough.

“This wall was only designed to hold back the 2023 level. The super El Niño now being anticipated is expected to be much bigger. The 2023 flood reached up to four metres. And since this one is expected to be bigger than that, the wall itself is only three-and-a-half or four metres. So that's how it is.”

Beyond the wall, the only other defence most farmers have is sandbags useful against a small rise in the river, and not much else.

“Sandbags are meant for when there are small floods. But in a very large flood, the water can rise up to four metres above the river. Once it finally reaches its peak, it goes over the wall and everything, out into the open, straight toward the trees. It ends up affecting the town and the surrounding environment as well.”

What the water took

Ibaado's story does not begin with water. She came to Beledweyne fleeing drought, looking for a more stable way of life. She found one, for a while.

“I fled here because of drought. Here, I found a way of life, somewhere better to live - that's why I came. But then, after I had been living here for a while, floods hit me too. The floods came while I was pregnant. I lost several of my children.”

She described the moment the 2023 floods reached her home, the strange, split-second calculations a person makes when water is already coming through the door.

“Nowadays, if even a little rain falls, the rain that follows makes the river overflow onto us. While I was just lying there like this, thinking about where I had my belongings tied up, I thought - let it go, it is just belongings, gather yourself and your family instead. Before I could even gather everything, the water had already come in on us. That's how these situations happen when they come.”

The flood took more than shelter.

“All our food supplies got soaked and ruined by water. Anyone who had livestock - the flood took their livestock away.”

Ibaado recalls the 2023 events, when she lost several children Photo: Andrew Kirschenbaum

Somewhere to go but not somewhere to stay

Part of Beledweyne’s preparation for this year is a piece of high ground identified for evacuation, should the water rise as forecast. It would keep people safe from the river. It would not, on its own, keep them going.

There is no water source at the site, and no sanitation. It sits far enough from town that anyone relying on casual daily labour in town would struggle to reach work from there. Safety and survival are not always the same question, and in Beledweyne this year, that gap is visible on the ground: a plot of dry, safe earth with nothing built on it yet.

The town's local hospital knows this tension too. It was itself damaged in the 2023 floods, at the exact moment people needed it most.

Brace for the shock

There is a version of this story that ends differently, and Beledweyne has already lived it once.

Ahead of the 2023 floods, DRC used forecasts, not the flood itself, to act early, delivering unconditional cash assistance to nearly 900 households in the town. That gave families the means to prepare, protect what they could, and relocate on their own terms if needed, to sites that were ready to receive them. By the time the water peaked, more than 90 percent of the households DRC had supported had already moved to safety.

It is not a solution to the flood - the river will still rise. Farms like Mohammed's will still be tested against a wall built for a smaller storm. But it is proof that the outcome for families like Ibaado's does not have to be identical every time the river does what rivers do. Forecasts, funding, and a plan that moves before the emergency does changed what 2023 looked like for hundreds of households in this town. DRC and partners are working to make sure more families in Beledweyne, and across the region, get that same head start this year.