The Sahel is a strip of land that stretches across Africa, from the Sahara Desert in the north to the savannah in the south, and from Senegal in the west, to Eritrea in the east.
Five Sahel countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger – established the G5 Sahel in 2014 as an institutional framework to coordinate their regional cooperation in overcoming a number of common challenges, mainly related to climate change and security. Since the 1970s, temperatures in the Sahel have risen twice as fast as in the rest of the world, and rainfall patterns are highly variable, increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods. The extreme variability of climatic conditions, compounded by unsustainable agricultural practices, has led to the loss of arable land and pasture. This in turn has increased rivalries over land among farmers and nomadic herders. These tensions have been greatly exacerbated by rapid population growth, despite a slow decline in fertility rates.
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