This is a tropical grassland, dominated by a continuous or discontinuous cover of short grasses, normally interspersed with a very discontinuous layer of small shrubs. Both are generally from 15 cm to 1 m in height, so this is a pretty low-lying vegetation. As such, it can be seen as a nearly perfect transition from savanna to tropical desert. It's also found in northern Australia, just north of the Australian desert but south of the savannalands there. The drier a climate is, the less predictable is its precipitation.
Famine accompanies drought here.
Sometimes we see that human tendency to respond to low level, recurrent hazards by setting society up for the rarer high-magnitude event. In the Sahel, international agencies have sunk boreholes to tap fossil water and give people a place to get water for their animals even in drought. Their overgrazing kills the local grasses and shrubs. This, of course, makes the landscape even less able to support the human population, which becomes really apparent when the rains fail and marginal farmers and animal herders lose their few resources and starve by the dozens of thousands. The second two subtypes of the grassland biome are temperate ones.