Africa’s Sahel Region Urgently Needs the World’s Help
With arable land declining and the population soaring, countries along the Sahara’s southern border face humanitarian disaster.
She should be in school.
Photographer: Nabila El Hadad/AFP/Getty Images
Strong and sustained global growth has enabled living standards throughout most of the world to converge on an upward course. Even throughout Africa, the world’s poorest continent, there have been drastic improvements in health, education and governance. Countries such as Ethiopia and Tanzania are seeing the start of industrialization.
Yet a few parts of the world remain mired in desperate poverty. The largest and most troubled of these is the Sahel region of Africa — the long strip of arid land along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Its outline is hard to define, and doesn’t overlap well with existing national boundaries, but generally the Sahel includes Mali, Niger, Chad, South Sudan, Burkina Faso and the northern half of Nigeria, as well as smaller pieces of several other countries.