Drought - Aug 2018
Drought
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedSouthern Madagascar is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe, with 1.5 million people—half the region’s population—needing immediate emergency food assistance, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 1,500,000
- What help is neededThree straight years of drought have wiped out harvests and hampered people's access to food and COVID-19 is compounding their suffering.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Southern Madagascar is in the grip of a humanitarian catastrophe, with 1.5 million people—half the region’s population—needing immediate emergency food assistance, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today. Three straight years of drought have wiped out harvests and hampered people's access to food and COVID-19 is compounding their suffering. Those experiencing “crisis” or “emergency” hunger conditions—three times the number forecast mid-year—are mostly children and women. Of the ten hardest-hit southern districts, Amboasary is the epicenter; families barely scrape together enough food with raw mangoes and tamarind often their only food source. Mothers can no longer breastfeed and are forced to give their infants water which is in scarce supply. A WFP assessment in Amboasary last month found three out of four children had quit school - mostly to help their parents forage for food. ( WFP, 30 Nov 2020 )
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 1,500,000 retained at 2018-08-14
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 91618ef1c8876beb1e38dcd6e551e7b21ce9992bd3d6b497715d3e73ecd1c815