Nearly 3.5 million sheep and goats leave Somaliland’s port of Berbera each year, most of them within weeks of the Hajj. It is one of the Horn of Africa’s largest formal livestock export flows — and one of its least equitable, capturing most of its value long after it leaves the herder’s hands.

Kenya’s poultry sector looks, on paper, like one of the region’s more modern livestock industries — organised integrators, branded day-old chicks, commercial feed mills. In practice, it is one of the most financially fragile: a single input line, feed, determines whether an entire production cycle turns a profit, and the sector’s biggest competitive threats come not from disease or drought but from trade policy on two fronts at once.

Kenya produces more camel milk than any country on Earth, yet loses half of it before it reaches a buyer. Ethiopia sends camels north to Sudan and Egypt on a corridor where prices have historically outrun every other livestock species. As drought reshapes East African rangelands, the camel economy is where climate adaptation and commodity opportunity meet.