The Mandera cluster, consisting of the borderlands of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, is susceptible to conflict and climate risks that undermine the capacities of the populations therein to lead fruitful lives. This conflict and climate assessment has been produced within the context of the Cross-Border Community Resilience (CBCR) Activity in order to provide the technical evidence base for the Activity’s conflict sensitivity programming.

As such, the assessment identifies the main conflict and climate trends in the Mandera cluster, together with the drivers and dynamics of the conflicts and climate risks, and opportunities for promoting social cohesion and climate risk adaptation. The aim is to obtain evidence for coming up with social cohesion projects in this conflict prone zone, while adhering to conflict sensitivity when designing interventions across the cross-border area. At the same time, the climate assessment explores the common and differentiated climate risks across the cluster, the impacts of climate change on different groups, formal and informal mechanisms for addressing such impacts, the barriers as well as opportunities for climate risks mitigation.

The CBCR Activity’s overall ambitions of enhancing resilience among the Mandera cross-border communities, and thus reducing the need for humanitarian assistance cannot be achieved without the critical input of conflict and climate sensitive programming. It is therefore important that the CBCR implementing partners and other like-minded organizations, take into account the evidence laid out in this assessment in their programming.