Humanitarian need and political instability grow as armed groups expand their control of northern Burkina Faso. Learn more about why Burkina Faso features on the IRC’s 2023 Emergency Watchlist....

Five reasons why Burkina Faso ranks as one of the countries most at risk of experiencing a worsening humanitarian crisis in 2024.

The International Rescue Committee entered Burkina Faso in late March to begin an emergency needs assessment. The assessment began in Ouagadougou to conduct key informant interviews with other actors in country and to determine the priority location for this assessment, details of which are included below. Primary data collection was then conducted in Djibo to better understand priority needs of displaced Burkinabe and any gaps in the services currently available.

Conflict, economic shocks and climate change have left record numbers of people facing extreme hunger in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

A compound crisis of armed conflict and climate change is driving unprecedented levels of humanitarian need, displacement and food insecurity in the Central Sahel: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. But these impacts are distributed neither equally nor randomly across the region. This report examines how political decisions dating from the French colonial rule through the early 2000s have marginalized peripheral areas of the Central Sahel states both economically and politically.

Learn how conflict and climate change interact to form a compounded crisis in the Central Sahel, one of the world’s most vulnerable regions.