A drought monitoring system is being developed in South Asia, in a collaboration between GWP and the IWMI. A first Assessment Report has been released by GWP South Asia and the GWP-WMO Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP). Over one billion people in South Asia are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They are predominantly poor and vulnerable to drought. In order to prepare countries better for drought, the characteristics of their occurrence need to be well understood. With this background, a Need and Capacity Assessment Survey for the the development of a South Asian Drought Monitoring System (SA DMS) was conducted in Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka with the support of GWP’s Country Water Partnerships. It revealed that there is no validated system of early warning on drought that could meet the requirement for a high spatial resolution in any of the surveyed countries.