After visiting the central Sahel, Abdouraouf Gnon-Konde, the UN refugee agency UNHCR's regional director for west and central Africa, delivered a warning in Geneva about the pressures driving families from their homes.
On Friday, the United Nations said nearly four million people had been forced to flee their homes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The total has more than doubled in six years, UNHCR said. It includes 818,000 refugees and asylum seekers.
The scale of the rise is visible in UNHCR's earlier count. In 2020, the agency said the region had more than 1.7 million internally displaced people and 365,000 refugees.
UNHCR said continued attacks affecting civilians, climate-related shocks and severe humanitarian funding shortfalls were compounding the crisis. Gnon-Konde said those pressures were forcing more families to flee, eroding livelihoods and restricting displaced people's chances to rebuild their lives. He said the effects were contributing to further movement within and beyond the region.
He also warned that international attention was receding.
In Mali, most refugees come from neighbouring Burkina Faso. Koro, in Mali's central Bandiagara region near the border with Burkina Faso, hosted some 86,000 Burkinabe refugees in July. More than 14,000 of them were children. UNHCR said the refugee population was nearly equal to Koro's local host community.
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