Launching our support for adaptive social protection in the Sahel

Photo: Egill Bjarnason / Alamy

The Sahel stretches nearly 4,000 kilometres in an arc that straddles the width of Africa, separating the relatively more tropical African countries to the south and the arid desert to the north.

The Sahel G5 group of countries- Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger- are increasingly poised between promises of stability and growth and the mounting sources of stress and uncertainty that could mire the region’s progress.

Climate change is driving poverty, undermining food security, and fuelling conflict and displacement. The Sahel belt is amongst the regions with the greatest increases of heat stress and in the next two to three decades we expect more frequent and more severe droughts and floods across the Sahel G5 countries. After a decade of intermittent instability, armed violence has increased and spread in recent years.

The effects of these risks are impossible to ignore and fall mainly on poor and vulnerable households. Recent estimates show that food insecurity is pervasive and persistent, affecting nearly a third of Nigeriens and over a fifth of Mauritanians, for example. Compounding risks driven by climate change and conflict drive fragility across the region, making countries and regions even more vulnerable. One recent estimate found that roughly one in five Malians are vulnerable to drought.

Humanitarian assistance is essential and welcome. But it is also often volatile and not enough compared to needs—partly because aid usually arrives when needs are greatest, for example, when the drought has evolved into a famine. Ratcheting in development impact requires building governments’ ability to predict stress and deliver critical resources to the poor through assistance programs they operate and manage. In short, to respond to droughts instead of famines.

More and better disaster risk financing

The Centre for Disaster Protection will be working with the national governments in the region and the World Bank’s Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program to combine social safety nets that reach the poorest people with disaster risk finance analysis, predictive tools, and financing instruments. Working closely with the World Bank and responding to the needs that national governments and regional authorities identify, the Centre will bring to bear its expertise as the world’s only dedicated provider of analysis and research at the nexus of risk modelling, development economics, public financial management, aid programming, and humanitarian assistance. The goal is to support more and better disaster risk finance for adaptive social protection in the Sahel.

In parallel, the project will fill white space in the evidence base around ‘what works’ in financing and delivering social protection in a fragile context at the intersection of climate and political risk. In a warming world, these lessons can ultimately inform social protection programmes globally, helping the growing number of countries at the frontlines of climate change pivot from improvised response to pre-agreed and pre-financed support for people who would otherwise risk being left out and left behind.

Theo Talbot, the Centre’s Chief Economist, says:

“The Centre is honoured to work with officials from Sahelian governments and World Bank technical and policy experts to build safety nets that protect the poorest in full and on time. The critical shift in global development is a move to supporting countries with the tools and the know-how to tackle the problems on their doorsteps, combining an understanding of risks with smarter timing for getting resources to those in need—ultimately saving livelihoods and saving lives.”

The Centre’s support is generously enabled by a £3m investment by the UK and will run until 2026. The first phase of the Sahel Adaptive Social Protection Program ran from 2014 to 2019.