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The European Commission has released €235 million in humanitarian funding for West and Central Africa, directing the money toward conflict victims, displaced populations, food crisis survivors and communities that international aid organisations have historically struggled to reach — in a region where the intersection of war, climate shocks and governance failures has produced one of the world’s most complex and chronically underfunded emergencies.
Nigeria will receive €33 million from the package, the third largest country allocation after Chad and the Central Sahel bloc. The full distribution places €75 million in the Central Sahel — covering Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — more than €72 million in Chad, €22 million in the Central African Republic, over €16.6 million in Cameroon, €4.8 million in Mauritania, over €6 million in coastal countries and €6.4 million for regional projects spanning multiple borders.
EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management Hadja Lahbib, who visited Chad last year, put the human reality behind the numbers into plain language. “West and Central Africa are facing a storm of humanitarian crises, driven by conflict, poverty, hunger, instability, and climate shocks,” she said. “Last year in Chad, I saw the human cost with my own eyes: families who had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their homes lost, their livelihoods destroyed. For millions of people, humanitarian aid is not a choice. It is food on the table, clean water, medicine, shelter, and a chance for their children to learn again.”
The scale of what that aid is attempting to address is staggering. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that more than 50 million people across West and Central Africa currently require humanitarian assistance — a figure that has grown steadily for a decade as the Sahel’s interlocking crises have compounded rather than resolved. Conflict remains the primary driver, with the jihadist insurgencies that began in northern Mali around 2012 having since spread through Burkina Faso, Niger, northern Nigeria and increasingly into the coastal states of Togo, Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast. The EU’s own statement acknowledges that the Central Sahel conflict is “spilling over into the coastal countries, fuelling large-scale displacement both internally and across borders.”
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Chad’s position as the largest single-country recipient reflects both the severity of its internal crisis and its role as host to refugees fleeing violence elsewhere. The country shelters more than one million Sudanese refugees who crossed the border after Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 — a conflict that has produced what the UN has described as the world’s largest displacement crisis.
Eastern Chad, already among the poorest and most resource-constrained parts of an already poor country, is absorbing that influx while managing its own internal displacement from Lake Chad basin violence and food insecurity driven by desertification and shrinking water resources.
Nigeria’s €33 million allocation is directed primarily at the North-West and North-East, where two distinct but equally devastating crises have been running simultaneously. The Northeast has been living with the Boko Haram insurgency and its ISWAP offshoot since 2009, producing nearly two million internally displaced persons concentrated in and around Maiduguri and the Lake Chad fringes. The North-West has been increasingly consumed by armed banditry — organised criminal networks that have overrun hundreds of villages, abducted thousands of civilians for ransom and driven mass displacement into urban centres unprepared to absorb it. The EU funding targets both theatres, supporting food assistance, health services, protection programmes and livelihoods interventions for populations that have been living in crisis conditions for years without durable resolution in sight.
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Cameroon’s allocation addresses the country’s twin crises — the Anglophone conflict in the North-West and South-West regions, where armed separatists and government forces have been fighting since 2017, and the cross-border spillover of violence from the Central African Republic and the Lake Chad basin. The CAR allocation covers a country that has experienced near-continuous armed conflict since 2013, with successive peace agreements failing to produce lasting stability and large portions of the country remaining outside effective government control.
The €235 million figure, while substantial in the context of EU humanitarian programming, represents a fraction of the estimated funding gap across the region. UN agencies and international NGOs operating in West and Central Africa consistently report being funded at between 30 and 50 percent of assessed need, meaning that for every person reached, another goes without assistance. The EU is among the region’s largest humanitarian donors alongside the United States, United Kingdom and Gulf states, but the collective international response has not kept pace with the growth of need driven by conflict expansion and climate deterioration.
Commissioner Lahbib framed the EU’s commitment in terms of principled partnership rather than charity. “The European Union will always stand with people in crisis, as a reliable and principled humanitarian partner, to save lives, ease suffering, and bring hope where it is needed most.” The language matters in a regional context where European engagement is increasingly viewed through the lens of migration politics — critics argue that European humanitarian funding in the Sahel is as much about managing displacement before it reaches Mediterranean shores as about addressing suffering on its own terms.
What the funding will purchase in practice — tonnes of food, doses of vaccine, shelters erected, children enrolled in temporary learning spaces — will be distributed through a combination of UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and international and local NGOs operating under conditions of significant insecurity.
In parts of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, access restrictions imposed by armed groups mean that aid cannot reach some of the most affected populations regardless of funding levels, a constraint that money alone cannot resolve.
