A Borderland Where Shocks Travel Across Systems

The Mandera Triangle is a strategically significant cross-border region linking communities across Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia through shared livelihoods, trade networks, natural resources, and long-standing social

ties. Anchored by key border towns including Mandera, Beled-Hawa, Dollow, and Dollo Ado, the region serves as an important economic and social corridor connecting pastoral communities, social services, and trade systems across the Horn of Africa.

These connections create significant opportunities for regional integration, economic growth, and peacebuilding. Strong community networks, pastoral mobility systems, vibrant cross-border trade, shared social amenities like education and health systems continue to sustain livelihoods and strengthen local resilience and helped position the Mandera Triangle as a critical hub for commerce, cooperation, and regional stability.

However, the same interconnectedness that creates opportunity also amplifies risk. The region is highly exposed to recurrent droughts, floods, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, livestock disease, conflict spillovers, and violent extremism. Climate shocks frequently affect large areas simultaneously, placing pressure on water resources, grazing lands, and household livelihoods, while weak infrastructure, limited service delivery, and uneven governance capacity constrain communities' ability to cope and recover.

As a result, disruptions in one part of the tri-border area often have cascading effects across the wider region, affecting trade flows, mobility patterns, security dynamics, and social cohesion. Building resilience therefore requires approaches that extend beyond administrative boundaries and address the systems that connect communities, markets, and institutions across the borderlands.

BORESHA-NABAD is founded on this understanding. The programme recognises that resilience cannot be strengthened through isolated sectoral interventions or within individual country contexts alone. Instead, it views the Mandera Triangle as a shared resilience system in which social, economic, environmental, and governance dynamics are closely interconnected and require coordinated cross-border solutions.