Southern Africa: Drought - 2018-2020
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 happenedBetween October 2019 and March 2020, an estimated 430,000 people are facing severe acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3+) and require urgent humanitarian action. ( IPC, 23 Jan 2020 ) More than 4.34 million people in rural Zimbabwe are acutely food insecure facing Crisis (IPC Phase 3) or worse from February-June 2020.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 33,000
- What help is neededThis includes over 1.04 million people facing Emergency (IPC Phase 4) food insecurity, with Hwange, Kariba and Binga districts being the most vulnerable. ( IPC, 30 Mar 2020 ) According to the results of the IPC, around 26% of Lesotho’s population (380,000 people) are facing high food insecurity (IPC Phase 3) and above from July to September 2020 and require urgent humanitarian action.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Between October 2019 and March 2020, an estimated 430,000 people are facing severe acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3+) and require urgent humanitarian action. ( IPC, 23 Jan 2020 ) More than 4.34 million people in rural Zimbabwe are acutely food insecure facing Crisis (IPC Phase 3) or worse from February-June 2020. That is equivalent to 45% of the country’s rural population. This includes over 1.04 million people facing Emergency (IPC Phase 4) food insecurity, with Hwange, Kariba and Binga districts being the most vulnerable. ( IPC, 30 Mar 2020 ) According to the results of the IPC, around 26% of Lesotho’s population (380,000 people) are facing high food insecurity (IPC Phase 3) and above from July to September 2020 and require urgent humanitarian action. This includes around 33,000 people in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and 350,000 people in Crisis (IPC Phase 3). In the current period, seven districts are classified as Crisis (IPC Phase 3 ) with the exception of Butha-Buthe, Leribe and Berea, where around 560,000 people are classified as Stressed (IPC Phase 2) and require support to maintain their livelihoods. ( IPC, 28 Aug 2020 )
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against the retained source record, 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
- 33,000 retained at 2020-09-10
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 afc762c4cfefb2a5f01c741d681630e4a126df76287d260441c0a6881326cbc0No external source link was stored for this record.