This conflict trend report from ACLED is the second of our monthly reports that focus on regional conflict trends within Africa. We concentrate our analysis on recent political violence emanating from the Sahel belt and East Africa, due to the rise in instability there. Focus countries include Algeria, DR-Congo, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan & South Sudan.

Analysis is focused on the month of April 2012, with reference to violence patterns over the course of the last three months. Present conflict patterns are compared with recent violent with new trends, ac-tors and locations highlighted.

ACLED data is disaggregated by violence type, group and location. Recent additions to the dataset in-clude estimates of reported fatalities by event. Combining these features gives an overview of a region, country or actor’s particular conflict profile. In April, Somalia, Nigeria and DR-Congo were re-corded as having the highest number of events, in addition to the highest number of conflict-related fatalities (see Figure 1). Sudan and South Sudan, though the focus of much international attention at present, witnessed a lower number of discrete events. Fatalities in the neighbouring states were relatively high, although they are likely to be higher in reality, as many news reports simply reported ‘many’ or ‘multiple’ fatalities, which cannot be coded accurately.