What IGAD is and how it works

The drought that named it

The first name of the organisation was the Intergovernmental Authority on Drought and Development, and drought is the whole of the explanation for it. The rains failed across the region through the 1970s and into the 1980s, the famine that followed crossed every border in it, and no government there had an instrument for reading a season in advance that any of the others could read too. Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda established the authority in 1986 and gave it a secretariat in Djibouti City, on Avenue Georges Clemenceau, where it still sits. Eritrea acceded after independence in 1993.

What the summit of 1996 changed

The assembly of heads of state met at Addis Ababa in April 1995 and resolved to widen the remit. The revised organisation was launched at the fifth summit of the assembly, held in Djibouti on 25 and 26 November 1996, under a shortened name with the drought taken out of it. Three areas of cooperation were endorsed there: food security and environmental protection; economic cooperation and regional integration; and social development, peace and security. Four organs carry the work, in order: the assembly of heads of state and government, a council of ministers, a committee of ambassadors, and the secretariat.

The mediations, and the member they produced

What the widened remit produced, mostly, is negotiation. The Sudanese talks convened under the authority ran from 1993 through the Machakos Protocol of 20 July 2002 to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed at Nairobi on 9 January 2005. That agreement provided for a referendum in the south, the referendum was held in January 2011, independence took effect on 9 July 2011, and South Sudan joined the authority later the same year. The group mediated the agreement that produced one of its own members, which is not a common sequence.

In Somalia the authority convened a national reconciliation conference at Eldoret from October 2002, continued it at Mbagathi outside Nairobi, and closed it with transitional federal institutions in 2004. In South Sudan it convened the talks that produced the agreement of August 2015 and the revitalised version signed at Addis Ababa on 12 September 2018. Underneath the summits sits CEWARN, the conflict early warning and response mechanism, which collects incident data rather than communiques, and a mediation support unit in the peace and security division.

The part that still measures rain

The founding purpose runs on under a different name. The Drought Monitoring Centre at Nairobi was renamed the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre in 2003, accredited by the World Meteorological Organization as a regional climate centre in 2014, and moved its offices to Ngong in January 2020. It issues seasonal forecasts for eleven countries, which is more than the roster holds: the climate map and the treaty map are not the same shape, and the centre serves the Greater Horn of Africa rather than the signatories.

What the members hold separately

Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda have no coast. Ethiopia's ended with Eritrean independence in 1993, and the corridor to Djibouti carries the traffic that used to move north: the metre-gauge Franco-Ethiopian railway reached Addis Ababa in 1917, and the standard-gauge line built to replace it began commercial operations on 1 January 2018.

The high ground is spread across the group and so is the low. Mount Kenya stands at 5,199 metres, Mount Stanley at 5,109 on Uganda's border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ras Dashen at 4,533 in Ethiopia. Two members hold ground below the sea: Lake Assal in Djibouti at 153 metres under it and the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia at 125. The Blue Nile and the White Nile meet at Khartoum and the river then leaves the region entirely, for Egypt, which belongs to none of this. South Sudan's lowest recorded ground is the White Nile at 350 metres, and Uganda's is Lake Albert at 619.

The memberships overlap in every direction. All of them sit in the African Union. Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and Uganda are also partner states of the East African Community; Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan sit in the Arab League; Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda are in COMESA. The authority runs no customs union of its own, and the tariff preferences a trader would use are COMESA's or the Community's. A protocol on the free movement of persons in the region was adopted in 2020 and takes effect for a state on its own ratification.

Where the edges are argued

Eritrea is the open question. It acceded in 1993, suspended its own participation in 2007, and the list of member states the secretariat publishes on its own site does not carry it, while other published accounts of the membership still do. This catalogue files the roster the secretariat publishes, records that the question is answered both ways, and settles it no further.

The catalogue's own regions cut across the group as well. Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia file under the Horn of Africa here, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda under East Africa, and Sudan under North Africa. That is not a fault in either scheme. A region is a position on the ground and this is an agreement between governments, and the two were never going to draw the same line.