Research environment · Country dashboards
East Africa and Horn of Africa country dashboards
One dashboard per country, each in the same structure: the threat level and the direction the picture is moving, the drivers behind it, the indicators worth watching, the actors whose behaviour matters, and the public sources the reading rests on.
Every judgement on these dashboards is an analyst reading of public reporting. Direction of travel is a judgement, not a measurement. Nothing here is live monitoring: the picture is refreshed when the desk reviews the country, and the review date is shown.
Horn of Africa
Somalia
The security picture is set by an armed opposition that still reaches into Mogadishu and regional capitals, a security transition handing districts to forces whose hold is uneven, and federal-member-state politics that periodically turn into armed standoff. Movement risk is concentrated on the arterial roads between government-held towns rather than inside them.
Open dashboardEthiopia
Violence has moved from a single northern conflict to several regional insurgencies running at once, with Amhara and Oromia both producing road ambush, abduction and administrative closure. National politics, a contested post-war settlement in Tigray and economic strain interact, and movement outside the capital is the practical constraint on most programmes.
Open dashboardSudan
An active war between two conventional forces, with urban artillery and air strikes, mass displacement, siege conditions in parts of Darfur and Kordofan, and a collapsed banking and supply environment. This is not a country-risk problem so much as a war environment: presence decisions, not mitigation measures, carry most of the risk.
Open dashboardEritrea
A tightly controlled state with low reported crime and violence, and a risk profile driven by the state itself: movement permits, restrictions on independent activity, national service obligations and the consequences of regional alignment rather than by armed groups or criminality.
Open dashboardDjibouti
A stable, tightly policed state whose risk profile is external and maritime rather than internal: Red Sea attacks on shipping, the foreign military presence, and spillover from Ethiopia's internal conflicts along the corridor that carries most Ethiopian trade.
Open dashboardEast Africa
South Sudan
A national settlement that has repeatedly deferred elections, subnational armed violence largely disconnected from national politics, and an oil-dependent economy exposed to the war in Sudan. Risk to staff is dominated by armed criminality, roadblocks and localised cattle and land conflict, punctuated by political crises in Juba.
Open dashboardKenya
A functioning state with real capability, where risk is concentrated geographically and episodically: Al-Shabaab attacks and IED use in the north-east and coastal counties, banditry in the north-west, and protest policing in Nairobi and other cities that can turn lethal within a day of a political trigger.
Open dashboardUganda
A generally stable operating environment with two live problems: ADF attacks and device use associated with the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a political environment around national elections in which opposition activity is policed hard.
Open dashboardTanzania
The most settled major operating environment in the region. Risk is dominated by crime, road traffic and natural hazard rather than political violence, with a residual concern about extremist activity in the far south near the Mozambican border and periodic tightening of political space around elections.
Open dashboardRwanda
A low-crime, tightly administered environment where internal risk to staff is minimal and the material risk is external: the relationship with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the M23 conflict across the border, and the constraints of operating in a state that closely manages information and civic activity.
Open dashboardBurundi
A poor, tightly controlled state with a history of political violence, where risk comes from state and party-aligned actors, grenade and small-arms incidents, and the country's entanglement in the eastern Congo conflict, against a background of severe fuel and foreign-currency shortage.
Open dashboard