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Challenges and Opportunities
Lake Chad straddles four riparian countries, two regional economic communities, two landlocked countries and two countries that skew investment towards coastal regions. The region’s population is around 30 million people from different ethnicities, nations, and nationalities. The region has huge potential for farming, livestock, and fisheries but also serves as a hub for cross-border trade and human mobility in Africa. Most communities earn their living through cross-border trade and services to other major cities around the region. Before the Boko Haram insurgency broke out, Northeast Nigeria engaged in cross-border trade more than it did with the rest of Nigeria.
The populations living in the Lake Chad Basin depend heavily on the Lake for their livelihoods. However, from the 1979s to the 1980s, the lake’s water surface shrunk from 25,000 km² to only 2,500 km². Although the shrinking of the lake ended in the late 1980s, the reduction of the water surface heavily impacted economic activities and food security in the Lake Chad Basin, further aggravating intercommunal tension, with the search for alternate livelihoods pushing community members to engage with extremist groups.