Sahel refugee numbers soaring though still… far behind the world’s Top 10

Between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the number of refugees from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger now stands at 410,000. According to the United Nations (UN) in this recent document published on its website, the majority of refugees in the region have fled violence in Mali, the scene of a conflict that began in January 2012.

The UN agency says that in 2021, an upsurge in violent attacks across the region led to the displacement of nearly 500,000 people.

In the Sahel, 6 out of 10 displaced people are now Burkinabès

In  central Sahel, Burkina Faso has become the country with the highest number of displaced people. Internally, the total number of displaced people in this country plagued by repeated jihadist attacks rose to more than 1.5 million by the end of 2021. Six out of ten displaced people in the Sahel are now Burkinabès, according to the UN.

According to partner organisations cited by the United Nations, armed groups carried out more than 800 deadly attacks in 2022 in the central Sahel region. The violence has led to the uprooting of some 450,000 people in their country and forced 36,000 others to flee to a neighbouring country.

The UN agency’s document seen by Dialogue Migration indicates that in Niger, the number of displaced people in the regions of Tillabéri and Tahoua has increased by 53% in the last 12 months. And that in neighbouring Mali, more than 400,000 people are internally displaced, an increase of 30% compared to the year 2022.

Factors that push people to move

In a previous article, Dialogue Migration focused on the multiple causes of migratory movements in the world in general and in the Sahel region in particular. The United Nations seems to confirm the results of that research on the drivers of population displacement, often linked to crises such as conflict and climate change.

According to the document, “the humanitarian situation in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger is rapidly deteriorating in a context of crises on several fronts. Insecurity is the main driver, compounded by extreme poverty, the Covid-19 pandemic and the worsening effects of the climate crisis, with temperatures in the region rising 1.5 times faster than the global average.

In addition, women and children are often the most affected and are exposed to extreme vulnerability and the threat of sexual and gender-based violence. Host communities, according to the document, have continued to show resilience and solidarity in hosting displaced families, despite the limited resources available to them.

The UN said in 2021 that more than a third of High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) UNHCR’s financial needs for the Central Sahel have not been met. It had estimated the UNHCR need in 2022 at US$ 307 million to provide an effective response in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali.

7 African countries in the Top 10 countries of origin of the total refugee population in the world

In late 2020, there were 26.4 million refugees worldwide, of whom 20.7 million were under UNHCR’s mandate and 5.7 million were registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The total number of refugees is the highest on record, despite a slowdown in the annual growth rate since 2012.

In IOM’s State of Migration Report 2022, of the total refugee population of concern to UNHCR at the end of 2020, more than 80 per cent came from the top 10 countries of origin – Afghanistan, South Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Eritrea and Burundi. Many of these countries have been among the main source countries of refugees for at least seven years. It should be noted that seven of these 10 countries are from the African continent.

The IOM document adds that due to the ongoing conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic for 10 years, the number of Syrian refugees has increased to some 6.7 million, about 100,000 more than the previous year; the Syrian Arab Republic thus remained the main country of origin of refugees for the seventh consecutive year. The instability and violence that have made Afghanistan a major source of refugees for more than 30 years persist: with 2.6 million refugees in 2020 (up from 2.7 million in 2019), Afghanistan is the second largest country of origin in the world. Since large-scale violence erupted in the country in mid-2016, South Sudan has remained the third largest country of origin for refugees, with 2.2 million refugees at the end of 2020.

At the end of 2020, some 38 per cent of the world’s refugees were under the age of 18 (8 million of UNHCR’s 20.7 million refugees).

Around 21,000 individual asylum applications were filed by unaccompanied and separated children in 2020, down from 25,000 the previous year. As indicated in previous reports, current data and trends are largely due to the persistence or resumption of conflicts in key countries.