Thanks to a massive scale-up in humanitarian assistance, famine was averted, but it remains a looming risk in the future. Large parts of the drought-affected rural areas in southern and central Somalia were controlled by al Shabaab and were inaccessible to the government and most humanitarian organizations and international actors. To assess drought impacts under these circumstances and guarantee the personal security of staff, humanitarian actors relied on remote assessment methods that combined remote-sensing technologies and social media analytics.