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Impact of climate change on children in East Africa
What happens to children when drought, flooding or other climate shocks become part of everyday life?
By Gillian Mann and Emma de Vise-Lewis
We explored this question through three studies in Kenya, Madagascar and Ethiopia, commissioned by UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, case studies, participatory work with children and adults, and a review of existing evidence, the research looked at how climate risks interact with child protection issues, including child marriage, teenage pregnancy, violence, child labour, migration, family separation and FGM.
Some findings confirmed what we might expect. When water becomes scarce, crops fail and livestock are lost. Incomes drop, and food insecurity leads to family displacement and separation. Children leave school in greater numbers, start working at younger ages and in more hazardous circumstances. But some of the most striking findings were the ones that complicated the usual story.
Climate stress does not always mean increased levels of child marriage
Across East Africa, it is often assumed that increasing poverty and vulnerability will automatically result in higher rates of child marriage, with families resorting to marrying off their daughters to help make ends meet. Our research showed a more complex picture.
In parts of Kenya, Madagascar and Ethiopia, drought and livelihood loss were found to, in many cases, actually make it more difficult to undertake traditional marriages. Marriage often requires resources for bridewealth, ceremonies, and the establishment of the marital home. When repeated droughts have decimated livestock herds and household incomes, families may simply be unable to meet these expectations. Traditional marriages can therefore be delayed, simplified or not take place at all.
But that does not necessarily mean that adolescents are in a more secure or promising situation.
Alongside the decline or delay in traditional marriages, the studies found evidence of more informal, child-led unions. In Kenya, these include “come-we-stay” relationships; in Madagascar, informal peer unions are becoming a default option when traditional marriage is unaffordable. In Ethiopia, adolescent couples establish their union but only present themselves to their families afterwards. In all settings, these child-led unions can take place with little family involvement or support, and often leave girls – and any children they may have - particularly vulnerable if the relationship breaks down, which is often the case. This leads to separation, single parenthood, and a whole set of additional challenges.
Climate stress is reshaping how marriage is practised rather than when it occurs.
The psychological toll of climate change was impossible to ignore
Another cross-cutting finding from our studies was the sheer level of stress running through families and communities.
Repeated loss of crops and livestock, hunger, debt, displacement and uncertainty are not only economic problems. They affect relationships and emotional wellbeing across households. Men, women, girls and boys spoke about overwhelming anxiety, worry, sadness, frustration and exhaustion.
Struggling to meet basic needs can affect caregivers’ emotional capacity to support children. Heightened levels of household tension lead to harsher discipline, conflict and violence. Madagascar provided particularly stark examples of this, but similar patterns of marital strain, family conflict and weakened kinship support were also evident in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Mental health and psychosocial wellbeing cannot be treated as secondary consequences of climate crises. Communities consider these impacts to be directly related to children’s vulnerability and protection.
What happens when everyone needs help?
Perhaps one of the less visible consequences of prolonged climate stress is how it affects the systems of mutual support that families normally rely on.
In Kenya, participants described repeated drought as a kind of “great equaliser”: when everyone’s crops or cattle have been decimated, households have far less food, money or livestock to lend one another. Madagascar and Ethiopia showed similar pressures on kinship networks and informal protection systems.
This matters because families often depend on these informal support networks, precisely where formal services are sparse. When many households struggle at the same time, people have fewer resources to share and less capacity to help one another, leaving families most isolated exactly when they need support most.
What needs to change?
Protecting children means investing in the things that help families withstand shocks: livelihoods, social protection, access to water, school feeding, educational continuity, and services that can continue to reach children when families move. These are not always labelled “child protection” interventions, but they can reduce the pressures that push children out of school and into work, unsafe migration, transactional relationships and vulnerable unions.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is a simple one: climate change does not create an entirely new set of child protection problems. It changes the conditions in which existing ones occur — sometimes intensifying them, sometimes transforming them, and occasionally taking them in directions we did not expect.