Balaanbal Rangeland Enclosure — A Community-Managed Drought Reserve in Somaliland

Somaliland's Togdheer region has faced recurring drought and overgrazing that strips vegetation from communal rangeland, leaving pastoralist communities without fodder reserves when rains fail.

Since 2019, the Food and Agriculture Organization's Food and Nutrition Security Resilience Programme (FNS-REPRO) — funded by the Government of the Netherlands with a USD 28 million budget spanning Somaliland, Sudan's Darfur region and South Sudan — has worked with residents of Balaanbal (Burao district, Togdheer) to fence off a communal pasture reserve, with a locally elected Balaanbal Natural Resource Management Committee drawing up a resource-management plan, halting charcoal production on the enclosed land, and organising a community patrol to enforce the rest period.

The reserve's value was tested during Somaliland's 2025 drought: reporting from the Global Landscapes Forum found that roughly 20,000 livestock grazed inside the Balaanbal enclosure at a time when the surrounding open rangeland had no pasture left, giving herders a buffer that kept animals alive through the dry spell.

The evidence base is still thin — no published vegetation-cover, biomass or biodiversity survey specifically covers Balaanbal — and reporting elsewhere in Somaliland notes that enclosures set up without full community consultation have triggered conflict with mobile, customary grazing practices, a risk this FAO-brokered, committee-based governance model was designed to avoid.