Sahel Region: Addressing Gender Inequality, State Fragility, and Climate Vulnerability in the Sahel Region

Jul 30, 2024
ClimateLinks
View Original

Our world is facing tremendous and unprecedented environmental challenges, including climate change, biodiversity extinction, food insecurity, and public health crises. In the global south, many of these environmental challenges affect millions of livelihoods each day. The Sahel region of West Africa is experiencing expanding violent extremism, state fragility and conflict, and intense climate change impacts. Poverty, poor governance, and corruption further exacerbate local grievances and weaken and undermine fragile states. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s “Advancing Gender in the Environment: Exploring the triple nexus of gender inequality, state fragility, and climate change” study (Boyer et al. 2020), elucidated the interaction of the three factors and critical vulnerability (“triple nexus”). Environmental and political instability in the Sahel region continues to put pressure and stress on already fragile and scarce local economic resources and on limited social infrastructure, in turn, compounding social inequality (Wilson Center 2022).

Given the intensity and severity at which environmental and political events are unfolding in the Sahel, it is imperative to have a greater understanding of the effects of climate change and state fragility within each country, as well as regionally. From September 2022 through September 2023, INRM conducted a study on behalf of USAID/Senegal/Sahel Regional Office (SRO) and USAID Sahel Country Offices to better understand the context-specific local drivers and root causes leading to the triple nexus challenge in the region to help inform USAID programming and regional interventions.