Some 14 million people are forcibly displaced or refugees in West and Central Africa, double the number recorded in 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced today.
"In West and Central Africa, we have around 13.7 million refugees and forcibly displaced people. But by the end of the year, we expect this number to be 14 million, and to reach 15 million by the end of 2025," UNHCR Regional Director Abdouraouf Gnon-Kondé told reporters today at a conference on forced displacement in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
In 2019, the number of displaced people was estimated at around 6.5 million, he recalled.
The figure presented today does not include data from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) - a country that borders Angola - which itself has at least seven million displaced people.
Gnon-Kondé stressed that the situation in Chad is the most critical, with "650,000 refugees" from neighboring Sudan since April 2023 - the date that marks the beginning of the war in that country.
Before this conflict, Chad - which has an estimated population of 17 million inhabitants - already had around 420,000 Sudanese refugees on its territory, as well as tens of thousands of people from its other neighbors in security crisis, such as the Central African Republic, Nigeria and Cameroon, he added.
"Currently, one in every 17 people in Chad is a refugee," Gnon-Kondé stressed.
In addition to Chad, the situation in the Sahel is equally worrying, with Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger still facing deadly terrorist violence in large parts of their territories.
“There are between 4.5 and five million displaced people, mainly internally displaced people, but also refugees in the neighboring Gulf of Guinea countries, Mauritania and southern Algeria,” explained Gnon-Kondé.
Given situations where people have been unable to return to their homes, sometimes for decades, UNHCR stressed the importance of integrating these refugees into the development programmes of host countries.
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