There is a particular kind of institutional failure that does not announce itself with a single catastrophic event. It accumulates quietly, in the gap between what regional bodies promise and what displaced people receive. It is visible in the mother in Ouagadougou, who has been displaced three times in four years and has stopped expecting that anyone with a protection mandate will arrive in time.
It is visible in the 15,000 schools that had closed across the Sahel by mid-2025, and in the more than 900 health facilities that shuttered because insecurity made them impossible to staff or supply. West Africa is experiencing a displacement crisis of historic proportions, and the institutional architecture that was supposed to contain it has fractured at precisely the moment it is needed most.
On 29 January 2025, the formal withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States took legal effect, completing a process set in motion by the announcement of their departure a year earlier. The three countries, each governed by military juntas following successive coups, collectively formed the Alliance of Sahel States and walked away from five decades of regional integration.
The political logic of their departure is not difficult to understand. ECOWAS had imposed unprecedented economic and financial sanctions following the 2023 Niger coup, threatened military intervention, and was widely perceived across the Sahel as an instrument of Western and particularly French strategic influence rather than African solidarity.
The juntas framed their exit as an assertion of sovereignty. Their populations celebrated in the streets. But for the millions of people displaced by the conflicts those same governments have failed to resolve, the withdrawal has removed a layer of institutional protection that was already dangerously thin, and replaced it with very little that is functionally equivalent.
The Scale of What Is Now Unprotected
The numbers demand to be stated plainly before any analysis begins. As of September 2025, West and Central Africa hosted 21.2 million forcibly displaced and stateless people, a figure projected to reach 25.1 million by the end of 2026. Within the Sahel specifically, approximately 3.8 million people remained forcibly displaced at the end of 2024, representing a 58 per cent increase from the end of 2020.
Burkina Faso alone accounts for an estimated 4 million displaced people, representing nearly a fifth of the country’s entire population, though precise verification has become impossible since the military junta stopped reporting IDP numbers in 2023. Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon together account for over 80 per cent of internally displaced persons across the wider region. Women and children represent 80 per cent of the forcibly displaced population. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, more than 1.1 million people were newly displaced across West and Central Africa.
These are not statistics that emerge from a functioning humanitarian governance system. They are the measurable output of a system that has been overwhelmed, chronically underfunded, and now institutionally fragmented at the very regional level where coherent governance is most urgently required.
UNHCR’s regional budget was reduced by 50 per cent between 2024 and 2025, forcing prioritisation of life-saving assistance at the expense of everything else: refugee registration, documentation, education support, and shelter provision. The regional resettlement quota was cut by 64 per cent in 2025. UNHCR needed $409.7 million to cover humanitarian needs in the Sahel but had received only 32 per cent of that total by October 2025. Nearly 15,000 schools and more than 900 health facilities had closed across the region. This is not a humanitarian system under pressure. It is a humanitarian system in managed collapse, and the departure of three member states from ECOWAS has deepened the governance vacuum at the worst possible moment.
What ECOWAS Actually Provided, and What Is Now Missing
To understand what the AES withdrawal costs humanitarianly, it is necessary to be precise about what ECOWAS actually provided in terms of protection architecture. The ECOWAS free movement protocol, one of the most advanced of its kind on the African continent, allowed citizens of member states to move across borders without visas for up to 90 days. For displaced populations in the Sahel, this was not merely a convenience. It was a survival mechanism.
A family fleeing jihadist violence in northern Burkina Faso could cross into Ghana, Togo, Benin, or Cote d’Ivoire with a degree of legal certainty about their right to be present. The ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework, adopted in 2008, created institutional obligations around early warning, mediation, and civilian protection. The ECOWAS Standby Force represented, in principle at least, a regional rapid deployment capability.
The Alliance of Sahel States has introduced a 0.5 per cent import duty on goods from ECOWAS countries, with humanitarian aid explicitly exempted. ECOWAS, for its part, has maintained transitional arrangements preserving visa-free movement and passport recognition for citizens of the three departing states. These are pragmatic gestures, and they matter. But they do not address the deeper institutional rupture, which is that the primary regional mechanisms for conflict prevention, civilian protection monitoring, and cross-border displacement governance in West Africa have lost jurisdiction over the territory where the displacement crisis is most acute. The Sahel’s three worst-affected countries are now operating outside the regional protection architecture that was designed, however imperfectly, to cover them.
The Alliance of Sahel States has formed a joint 5,000-person force to combat extremist groups across member states, and has pivoted towards Russia, whose Africa Corps has replaced French military forces as the primary external security partner across all three countries. The security results of this pivot have been deeply contested. What is clear is that the humanitarian consequences of the underlying conflicts have not improved. Entire communities have been emptied in northern Burkina Faso, northern Mali, and western Niger. JNIM, the Al-Qaeda affiliate operating across the three countries, has reached its highest operational capacity since 2018, according to the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team. The armed group has imposed blockades on fuel supply routes, closed markets, and in some areas has begun performing governance functions, collecting taxes and settling disputes, filling the vacuum left by retreating state authority.
Ghana’s Position and the Southward Contagion Risk
Ghana occupies a specific and significant position in this regional picture, one that is rarely discussed with sufficient seriousness in domestic policy discourse. UNHCR’s definition of the Sahel “Plus” region, used for displacement monitoring purposes, explicitly includes Ghana among the countries affected by displacement from the Central Sahel. Ghana shares a long border with Burkina Faso to the north, a country that has displaced nearly a fifth of its population.
The conflict dynamics of the Sahel are demonstrably moving southward. JNIM’s expanding operations in northern Benin, Togo, and towards Nigeria’s Sokoto region represent a documented pattern of southward geographic expansion. Ghana’s northern regions, which share ethnolinguistic communities and porous borders with southern Burkina Faso, are not geographically remote from this trajectory.
Ghana currently has no formal internally displaced persons policy framework. It has no national legislation specifically addressing forced displacement, no dedicated IDP coordination mechanism, and no publicly available contingency planning for cross-border displacement scenarios. Its engagement with the regional displacement crisis has been principally through its ECOWAS membership and its hosting of ECOWAS institutional meetings, including the April 2025 extraordinary session in Accra, convened specifically to address the AES withdrawal. Ghana supported dialogue without endorsing the AES position, a balanced but ultimately passive stance for a country that may soon face the direct humanitarian consequences of Sahel instability arriving at its northern doorstep.
What Functional Humanitarian Governance Requires
The collapse of ECOWAS’s humanitarian architecture over the three departing states does not mean the architecture cannot be rebuilt or replaced. But it does require honesty about what rebuilding involves. Three things are simultaneously necessary, and each is more difficult than it sounds.
The first is a negotiated humanitarian access framework between ECOWAS and the AES that separates humanitarian obligations from political disputes. The model exists in international humanitarian law and in precedents from other fractured regional relationships. Humanitarian access to conflict-affected populations cannot be conditional on the resolution of political disagreements between blocs. ECOWAS and the AES must establish a joint humanitarian monitoring mechanism that gives UNHCR, ICRC, and operational NGOs the access guarantees they need to work across the borders between member and non-member states. This requires political will on both sides and sustained pressure from the African Union, which remains a shared institutional home for all parties.
The second is sustained international funding at a scale commensurate with the crisis. A 50 per cent budget reduction at UNHCR in the region at the precise moment that the regional governance architecture has fragmented is not merely unfortunate. It is a compounding catastrophe. The international community’s funding obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Global Compact on Refugees do not diminish because regional politics have become complicated. Ghana, as a stable democracy with credibility across both the West and Africa, is well-positioned to lead advocacy at the African Union and Commonwealth levels for the restoration of humanitarian funding at the scale the crisis demands.
The third is a long-overdue national conversation within Ghana about its own preparedness. A country that has no IDP policy framework, no national displacement legislation, and no specific planning for the eventuality of significant cross-border displacement from the north is not prepared for what the trajectory of Sahel instability may require of it in the coming years. That preparation does not require alarmism. It requires governance foresight of the kind that separates countries that manage crises from those managed by them, which is precisely what the displacement catastrophe in Burkina Faso has demonstrated to be in dangerously short supply.
The people living in displacement camps across the Sahel did not choose the political disputes that removed their regional protectors. They did not vote for the coups. They did not negotiate the withdrawal from ECOWAS. They did not summon the jihadist groups whose violence forced them out. They are simply present, in their millions, in the gap between what regional institutions promised and what those institutions have actually delivered. Closing that gap is the defining humanitarian governance challenge in West Africa today, and no country in the region has more democratic credibility, more institutional capacity, or more geographic and strategic responsibility to lead that effort than Ghana.
About the Author
Dominic Senayah is an International Relations and Policy Analyst based in England, specialising in African political economy, humanitarian governance, and migration diplomacy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the UK, and writes on trade policy, institutional reform, and Ghana–UK relations for audiences across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the wider Global South.
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