The Sahel: Challenges along an Ancient Trade Route
Concordis has worked in the Sahel since 2009, and currently undertakes several peacebuilding and mediation projects working mainly with vulnerable communities in situations of conflict or affected by past violence. As an international charity, firmly believes that community cohesion, reinforced through the support of mutual activities, is core to creating adaptable and resilient strategies for inhabitants who may be challenged by increasingly risky living conditions. Read more about the Sahel below, and the social, climatic, and security challenges it’s currently facing.
The Sahara desert and the humid tropics of Central Africa meet along the Sahel, defining it as a region vulnerable to change and abrupt transition. It is also home to approximately 250 million people. These inhabitants live through the consequences of severe drought in the form of food shortages, famine, soil erosion, and social disturbance, and although the drought’s trends were first recorded eight years ago, it is not unusual for drought to hit for centuries at a time. In an age of increasingly complex economic, societal, and cultural changes these conditions have had repercussions across the region, with an estimated 19.2 million people currently in need of basic services (OCHA, 2018). Moreover, demographic projections for the next 20 years predict a doubling of the current population, increasing strain on food production, water resources, and general infrastructure. In spite of these factors, Sahelian nations are hopeful and resilient, gaining more and more regional and international attention.
The Sahel has a semi-arid climate and partial savannah/desert ecology and the region has always had dramatic fluctuations in climate, changing from flourishing tropicality to intensive and long-term drought within a few decades. In recent history, it has seen an increase in drought events within seasons and between years, with soil erosion and land degradation as a consequence of less frequent rainfall.
The Sahel is generally thought to physically span the southern borders of the Sahara, from the “Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea: Senegal, the Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti,” although the G5 nations are politically defined as Sahelian.
Many cultures have flourished in this meeting place between desert and tropics - the first Sahelian trading kingdoms emerging at approximately 750 AD around the trading hubs of Gao, Djenné, and Timbuktu. From the 8th century onward the rise and fall of empires would have little effect on the continuity of trade in animals, precious metals, and rare and foreign commodities. The International Slave Trade notoriously flourished here on the Atlantic front, starting in North Africa and spanning all the way to East Africa. Colonisation of the region would occur incrementally, and, very broadly speaking, the western Sahel would remain under the influence and control of the French Empire whilst the British would control much of the eastern Sahel. From the late 1950s onward the countries of the Sahel would each gain their independence, and develop their own sense of national identity, geography, and history.
This era nonetheless shifted the way many international observers started to view the region. Indeed, the Sahel had become the poster child for humanitarian/environmentalist panic. The poverty of the region’s inhabitants according to development indicators and their countries’ lack of welfare and physical infrastructure, alongside recurring political instability, extreme meteorological and climate change trends, and highly publicized violent conflict, have painted an image of strife and desperation. The situation, although difficult for those inhabitants living in the region, is nonetheless more complex than simplified narratives of inevitable poverty/conflict/incapacity allow - especially with regards to climate.
Global climate change is widely acknowledged to be having extreme effects on vulnerable environments the world over. Projections in the rise of global climate temperatures are often correlated with increases in the incidence of dramatic climatic events, which may lead to more and more disasters, as well as increased ecosystem changes. There are two projections about how the Sahel’s geography may change. It will either succumb to intensified droughts and desertification, otherwise known as dryland degradation, or it will ‘benefit’ from increased levels of continental rainfall. Both of these projections nonetheless emphasize a critical need for adaptable infrastructure and means of accessing vital resources - both of which seem, in the political context of Sahelian nations, increasingly difficult to assure.
The Sahel’s drought has limited fresh water access and challenged agricultural and pasture production. There have also been pockets of intensified desertification which, if poorly managed, risks exacerbating and spreading. Indeed, previous droughts in the 20th century deeply affected populations and infrastructure, and had
“huge socio-economic and environmental impacts (...) resulting in massive-scale migration, famine and environmental degradation (desertification), especially during the last two drought episodes.”
Ever since the start of the 20th century, the frequency, coverage, and severity of droughts on the African continent has increased, suggesting that the first projection may seem more likely to occur. Recent studies have confirmed that even with a minimal increase in temperatures in the Sahel, from 1,2 to 1,9 degree Celsius (°C), the rate of malnourished persons in West Africa will increase by 95% by 2050. Furthermore, “some studies have shown that a 3% temperature increase will lead to a 15 to 25% decrease of food production.”
The most dire issues Sahelian populations are now facing are food insecurity and challenges in accessing water.
Many inhabitants of the region are agriculturalists or pastoralists (see Figure 2 below), whose livelihoods are dependant upon their land or access to land - climate change, in this regard, may severely impact many inhabitants. Environmental changes are already shifting traditional transhumance/pastoralist migration routes, further causing land access issues and conflict and exacerbating social strains in areas that are not used to accommodating pastoralists. On top of this, irrigation is severely underdeveloped in the region, and much of Sahelian nations' existing irrigation infrastructure lay in states of disrepair.
The region presently counts 32 million people (2018 figures) at risk or struggling with access to food, including 4.7 million children.The countries of the Sahel all performe poorly on the UNDP’s Human Development Index, and the general lack of contingency planning or social infrastructure in case of shock is such that millions of households risk falling into crisis at the smallest change in environmental or financial conditions.
Figure 2: OECD Map of livelihoods in the Sahel, 2010
Lack of political infrastructure, effective governance, and oversight are frequent problems in Sahelian countries, compounding a lack of economic opportunity, frequent youth unemployment due to non-diverse economies, and a tendency towards sparsely inhabited areas. These factors make effective and inclusive governance difficult. Analysts, including those here at Concordis, emphasize these as important drivers of tension and violence. This is exacerbated by conflict and violence becoming increasingly ‘regionalized’ due to porous (mismanaged or unmanageable) borders.
Alongside this, armed extremist groups, like Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and their exploitation of national and local grievances are an increasingly major security issue that has drawn concern outside of the Sahel. These groups are also increasingly ill-defined and shifting, adopting new names, allegiances, and locations frequently with complete disregard for national boundaries. France, the USA, the AU and the EU are just some of the international actors who are now involved in one way or another in security maintenance or peace enforcement in the region, as the Sahel is increasingly represented and understood as a ‘breeding-ground’ for extremism and terrorism threatening international security. On the ground, the result of past and ongoing turmoil in the Sahelian nations has been the displacement of as many as 4.5 million people.
Drug-trafficking of cocaine and heroin through West Africa is not a new phenomenon, but it did expand extensively in the region from the early 2000s onward, after Latin American drug syndicates shifted their market towards Europe from the USA. Transnational organized criminal networks such as these, alongside people trafficking networks, have been increasingly treated as being at the crux of security issues in the region, often engaging with terrorist networks and encouraging government corruption. Nonetheless, criminal activity in the Sahel is lucrative and embedded as “the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has estimated that major illicit flows linked to criminal activities in the Sahel amounted to $3.8 billion annually.”