The Sahel region of Africa is among the world’s most affected regions by the intertwined crises of climate change and conflict. More than 32 million people in the region have been affected by the consequences of the dangerous intersection of conflict and climate. With climate shocks exacerbating existing tensions and conflict deepening vulnerabilities, large‑scale displacement has followed, disproportionately affecting women and children, who account for nearly 80% of those forced from their homes.
Extreme weather conditions and constant displacement are disrupting farming and cattle rearing(the backbone of Sahelian livelihoods), intensifying competition over scarce land and water resources. Yet reports from OCHA suggest that the number of humanitarian organizationsworking in Central Sahel dropped from 310 in December 2024 to 269 in June 2025 due to aid cuts. Even so, UNHCR’s 2025 appeal for the Sahel is barely onethird funded, and the broader $2.1 billion humanitarian appeal for Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger stands at less than 20 per cent.
The result is a dangerous contraction of lifesaving support in an area where climate and conflict-driven displacements are accelerating more than expected. The growing gap between climate-conflict impacts (as projected by our recent synthesis research project in the Sahel at the University of Cape Town) and declining development aid (driven by a shift towards aid-for-tradepolicies in major donor capitals) suggests that stakeholders must adopt innovative, flexible, and resilience-focused intervention approaches.
While aid for trade can deliver benefits where markets and institutional capacity exist, its growing prioritization can be devastating for countries in the Sahel with limited trade capacities but urgent humanitarian needs. As Oxfam’s former Executive Director, Winnie Byanyima,warned during last year’s G20 leaders’ summit, “without global solidarity, the inequality between countries will continue to widen” and “We will live in a more dangerous world as these inequalities increase.”
A Snapshot of Aid Cuts Across the Sahel’s Major Hotspots
Proponents of the trade over aid agenda have been careful in their framing. In most cases, they have insisted that trade is not intended to replace humanitarian and development assistance. At the same time, aid agencies are sounding the alarm over deep humanitarian aid cuts. Aid cuts are coming at a time when global crises driven by escalating climate shocks and widening conflicts are multiplying faster than humanitarian systems can respond. Recent budget decisions by major donors reveal just how sharply development assistance is being rolled back across the Sahel.
The European Union recently announced that an initial €557 million of its €1.9 billion global humanitarian budget for 2026 will be directed to West and Central Africa, including the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin. However, this announcement comes after years in which major EU member states have scaled back assistance across the region, creating structural funding gaps that even this renewed allocation is unlikely to reverse. Mali received about US$121 million in official development assistance from France in 2020 alone. In an interesting turn of events, France announced the suspension of its public development aid to Mali in 2022, citing potential risks of its misappropriation and concerns related to the deployment of Russia’s Wagner Group by the ruling military regime in Mali. This decision was further shaped by the widening political and diplomatic rift between France and Mali, marked by worsening relations, mutual distrust, and Mali’s growing resistance to French influence.
This policy shift had direct consequences for major French international NGOs, triggering the loss of millions of euros and disrupting long‑term programs in health, nutrition, food security, and water and sanitation, particularly in northern Mali. As tensions between both countries escalated, Mali’s military junta moved to ban all French‑linked NGOs, an unprecedented decision that also left thousands of aid‑dependent communities in limbo.
Recent U.S. aid cuts triggered by Executive Order 14169 are also reshaping the Sahel’s humanitarian and development landscape. Analysis by the Center for Global Development estimates that at least $852 million (nearly 30% of total U.S. aid to the region) has been cut, a figure that likely understates the true scale of the retrenchment. Moreover, reports from the Lake Chad Basin (a Sahelian hotspot spanning Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon) show that the cancellation of roughly 83 percent of USAID contracts in early 2025 has disrupted life‑saving interventions in food assistance, health, education, peacebuilding, and climate adaptation.
Beyond Europe and the US, Canada, in 2025, also announced $2.7 billion in cuts to its international development assistance over four years, further reinforcing a global aid contraction at the very moment climate change, conflict, and displacement are driving needs to historic levels. Analysts have described this moment as an unprecedented collapse in foreign aid, with OECD donors cutting assistance by nearly a quarter last year, inflicting severe damage on humanitarian systems, and offering limited pathways to recovery.
What Major INGOs Can Do as Aid Shrinks
As declining development funding affects vulnerable populations around the world, particularly in the Sahel, international and local NGOs must adapt strategically to be more impactful under these constrained conditions. They can do so by:
1. Relying on existing legal frameworks and regional mechanisms that assist Sahel states to host and assist displaced populations to advocate for and support victims of climate-conflict migrating internally within the region during this period of shrinking aid budgets.
2. Identifying, supporting, and scaling up proven local solutions, such as community‑developed zaï pits in Burkina Faso, that have demonstrated effectiveness in strengthening food security and climate resilience.
3. Prioritizing locally driven, cost‑effective adaptation measures rooted in indigenous knowledge and community practice to enable affected populations to lead affordable and sustainable climate responses in an era of declining development funding.
4. Collaborate with local NGOs, civil society, and researchers to strengthen community-based conflict prevention and social cohesion mechanisms. This can be done by working with local leaders, women’s groups, youth associations, and displaced communities to mitigate rising tensions.
5. As armed groups in the Sahel increasingly use drones for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and IED attacks, NGOs can support civilian protection through communitybased early warning and responsible AI analysis of climate and displacement data, supporting anticipatory action amid declining aid resources.
As major government donors in the Sahel increasingly prioritize a tradeoveraid agenda (publicly framed as complementary to development assistance but, in practice, driving cuts to humanitarian funding), they risk locking in climateconflict dynamics, deepening inequality, and further weakening already fragile health systems. These effects are unlikely to remain confined to the Sahel. Extensive evidence from past crises shows that prolonged instability, displacement, and weakened health systems can generate cross‑border spillovers, shaping migration patterns, security risks, and shared public‑health challenges even in donor countries.
