At the crossroads of forced displacement and disability, the Sahel harbours a population that neither statistics nor migration policies can fully name. Women migrants with disabilities are rendered invisible three times over by gender, migratory status and disability alike, in a region where conflict, climate crisis and state fragility drive millions from their homes and deposit them into systems structurally unequipped to see them.
What the data still cannot measure
The Global Migration Data Portal is unambiguous on this point. Data on disability in migration contexts are rarely collected and, when they are, methodologies vary so widely across countries as to make any comparison unreliable. In the Sahel, this gap is even more pronounced since the statistical capacities of the region’s States rank among the weakest in the world and social protection systems remain very limited.
It is nonetheless known that among forcibly displaced persons, disability prevalence ranges from 15% to 33% depending on context, a rate well above the global average. Applying the lower bound to the 117.3 million forcibly displaced persons recorded by mid-2025 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one arrives at a figure of at least 17 million persons with disabilities among the displaced. This figure is a conservative estimate, likely far below the real number, and the Sahelian share of that total remains without reliable measure.
This statistical opacity is not a technical detail. It has direct consequences on policy since what is not counted is not funded and not addressed. The Global Disability Inclusion Report 2025, coordinated by UNICEF with the International Labour Organization (ILO), UN Women and the OHCHR for the Global Disability Summit, finds that migration systems frequently ignore the needs of persons with disabilities, with inaccessible procedures and legal barriers. It further notes that one-size-fits-all approaches are inadequate and that gender, age and migration status combine to intensify barriers. This is not intersectional theory; it is an operational description of the field, particularly visible in the displacement camps of the central Sahel where specialised services are virtually nonexistent.
Migration itself can create or aggravate disability. The trajectories of violence across the Sahel, prolonged detention at transit borders, lack of care during the migration journey and the accumulated physical and psychological traumas produce disability situations that did not previously exist. For women, who are more exposed to gender-based violence during migration, this dynamic of acquired or worsened disability is particularly documented in contexts of armed conflict such as the Lake Chad Basin or the Three Borders region (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso). Data are missing precisely where the need for protection is most acute.
When vulnerabilities compound into exclusion
The concept of double minority is now well established in migration and disability literature. Researchers at the Refugee Council USA describe with precision how the combination of migration status and disability produces barriers that are not merely additive but often exponential. Irregular status cuts off access to services and disability makes it even harder to access regularisation procedures. For women migrants with disabilities in the Sahel, this double minority logic becomes triple. UN Women states clearly in its gender-responsive guide to the Global Compact for Migration that migrant women face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that limit their access to resources, legal protection and support services.
In the asylum procedures available in Sahelian transit and host countries, cognitive, neurological or trauma-related disability directly affects the ability to testify coherently, to maintain a linear narrative and to satisfy the credibility requirements of adjudication systems. Human Rights First has documented that immigration officials regularly misunderstand the impact of disabilities on memory and testimony, to the detriment of applicants. For women whose cases often rest on accounts of violence endured, this procedural bias is doubly penalizsng. Article 11 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obliges states to protect persons with disabilities in situations of risk and humanitarian emergency. In practice, its application to migration procedures remains highly deficient, and more so in the Sahel where several countries lack a formally operational asylum system.
Economically, women migrants with disabilities find themselves at the convergence of several simultaneous exclusion factors. Non-recognition of foreign qualifications affects all migrants and disability further narrows the range of accessible employment, while gender norms concentrate women in informal sectors where no protections exist. The Global Disability Inclusion Report 2025 highlights that the care work crisis hits women with disabilities particularly hard, caught between growing service demand and systems that guarantee neither their autonomy nor their dignity. In Sahelian transit cities such as Niamey, Agadez, Gao or N’Djaména, a woman migrant with a disability who arrives alone, without a family network, without regular status and without access to adapted services is not facing sequential obstacles. She is facing a single, composite wall that is often insurmountable.
What migration policies must now build
The normative framework exists. Objective 7 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration explicitly calls for disability-responsive approaches. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Sustainable Development Goals all call for no one to be left behind, including migrants and persons with disabilities. The problem is not the absence of norms but the absence of enforcement mechanisms and data to measure gaps, and this shortcoming is particularly striking in the Sahel where national social protection frameworks remain weak and resources limited.
Five levers are priorities in this context. The first is the collection of sex-disaggregated data by disability type across all Sahelian migration contexts and at every stage of the migration journey, strengthening the capacities of national statistics offices and humanitarian data collection systems. The second is the adaptation of asylum and regularisation procedures to the needs of persons with disabilities, with trained interpreters, adjusted timelines and alternative modalities for testimony. The third is the systematic training of migration service officers in identifying and accommodating disability, with particular attention to invisible disabilities and the sequelae of armed conflict trauma. The fourth is the establishment of referral mechanisms ensuring that a woman migrant with a disability who is a victim of gender-based violence is directed to services capable of simultaneously addressing both realities, without forcing her to choose between the two. The fifth is the direct participation of women migrants with disabilities in the design, monitoring and evaluation of the policies that concern them, which requires investment in their collective organisation and representation in regional consultation spaces such as the ECOWAS framework or the Rabat Process.
The Global Disability Summit of April 2025 integrated for the first time in a structured manner the question of migration into its disability agenda. That is a signal. It would be a pity if that signal were to remain one more resolution in an already rich and under-applied normative corpus. Women migrants with disabilities in the Sahel are not asking for an exception. They are asking to be counted, seen and heard in systems that, for now, render them invisible three times over.
Baltazar ATANGANA & Charline FEUYEM