‘Nowhere scares me more than the Sahel’ warns UN humanitarian chief

Sahel has reached a 'tipping point' warns UN humanitarian chief

Credit:  FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP

Africa’s Sahel region is “very close to a tipping point” and “nowhere scares me more”, the UN’s humanitarian chief has warned.

Mark Lowcock said that a cocktail of conflict and insecurity, weak governance, chronic underdevelopment and poverty, demographic pressures, and climate change is taking the northern African region to the brink.

"I am tasked with dealing with the world’s worst humanitarian tragedies. Nowhere scares me more than the Sahel," said the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator in a speech in Paris.

"I fear the region is very close to a tipping point – and so by extension are its African neighbours, Europe, and the world."

He told students of Sciences Po that a “preventable tragedy is looming” in the six countries of central Sahel, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Niger, and the north-east of Nigeria.

There are currently more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance across these six Sahel countries — double the number of 2015, he said.

Battle for the Sahel

However, getting aid to the region had become “extremely dangerous” with a record 85 attacks against aid workers last year — twice the number of the previous worst year.

Meanwhile, to date, only 30-40 per cent of the $2.5 billion in funding required to provide emergency assistance for the rest of 2020 and 2021 had been met.

Mr Lockwood issued the appeal ahead of a major conference on the central Sahel next week held by the UN, together with Germany, Denmark, and the EU.

Humanitarian aid was, however, only “a band-aid on a much deeper wound,” he said. “And right now, the wound is growing faster than the band-aid.”

One issue is demographic pressure. In 2010, the population of the region was 240 million, today, it is more than 310 million. “By 2030, it will be well over 400 million. And some projections envisage almost a billion people in the wider region by 2050,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Sahel is "truly the epicentre of accelerating climate change. A canary in the coalmine of our warming planet”.

Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters from RAF Odiham in Mali

Credit: Simon Townsley 

All this has fuelled insecurity and terrorism. “Only one militant Islamist group, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, operated in Mali in 2012,” he said. “By 2018, more than 10 groups were active in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, in addition to groups like Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin.”

State authorities in Sahel countries had to be helped to prosecute “a military response against the extremists and the organised criminals” he said. France, in particular, has 5,000 soldiers in Mali alongside African forces of the G5 Sahel and the UN’s peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA.

Most importantly, public policy had to “address the causes, not merely respond to the symptoms”.

Decision-makers in the region itself, above all legitimate national and local authorities must play the “leading role and main responsibility,” he added.

“Unless both of those two things happen, the situation will not improve.”