2025 Sahel Humanitarian Needs and Requirements Overview (May 2025)

The Sahel is a region of extraordinary strength, resilience, and opportunity. Yet for too many of its people, daily life is marked by hardship, fear, and uncertainty.

Today, the Sahel faces an intensifying convergence of crises: including escalating violence and conflict, the devastating impact of climate change, deepening poverty and political instability. These challenges are forcing families from their homes, depriving children of education, straining already limited resources, and placing the lives and dignity of millions at risk.

Nearly 29 million people across the region are now in need of humanitarian assistance and protection. Behind each figure in this Humanitarian Needs and Response Overview is a human being - a mother, a child, a grandparent - struggling to survive.

The Sahel’s challenges do not stop at its borders. The crisis is spilling into West Africa’s coastal countries and neighbouring regions, risking a further increase in humanitarian needs across the region. Failure to respond adequately in the Sahel will deepen the vulnerabilities of millions and further erode coping capacities across the region.

Despite this difficult context, humanitarian actors achieved remarkable results in 2024. Across the Sahel, millions of people received food, clean water, shelter, education, health care and protection services—thanks to the tireless efforts of the authorities, local communities, national organisations, NGOs, and UN agencies. Donors’ generosity has saved lives, reduced suffering, and given vulnerable people hope.

In 2025, we aim to assist 18 million of the most vulnerable people across the Sahel. That effort will require US$4.3 billion. But growing insecurity, access challenges and severe underfunding are forcing humanitarians to make impossible choices—deciding who receives help and who must wait. So far in 2025, only 8 per cent of the required funding has been received, compromising our ability to meet the growing humanitarian needs across the Sahel.

Across the region and around the world, Humanitarian Coordinators and Humanitarian Country Teams have undertaken rigorous reprioritization exercises this year to focus limited resources on people facing the most severe needs.

This includes narrowing the geographic scope of operations and concentrating even more intensively on lifesaving and protection activities, to ensure that assistance and protection reach those in the most urgent situations. In the Sahel, this exercise identified a smaller set of re-prioritized targets and requirements within the year’s full plans: 8.8 million people at a total cost of $1.9 billion. At a minimum, we are urging full support to achieve re-prioritized targets.

The people of the Sahel are not giving up. Nor should we. There is hope—in their strength and determination, in the courage of humanitarian workers on the frontlines and in the reforms and innovations taking root across our sector. We are seeing more anticipatory action, stronger local leadership, streamlined coordination, and more transparent, needs-driven decision-making.

But humanitarian aid alone will not resolve the Sahel’s complex crises. It must be matched by bold political action to address the root causes of violence and inequality; sustained investment in development and climate resilience; and a firm commitment to international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians.

This document is more than simply a report. It is a call to action. The Sahel needs solidarity, not apathy. Partnership, not abandonment. Dignity, not despair.

Let this be the year we choose to act differently. The year we reaffirm the value of every life, and the power of shared humanity. The year we step up and help the people of the Sahel build a better future.

Charles Bernimolin
Head of the Regional Office for West and Central Africa – United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs