Why Burkina Faso is the World's Most Neglected Crisis
And what makes a crisis "neglected," anyway?
Since 2019, Burkina Faso has been in a state of near-constant conflict. Extremist groups control or occupy large swaths of the country—about 40-50% according to some estimates. Meanwhile, the government is extremely unstable and has been toppled by a succession of military coups. To make matters worse, the military government in power today is generally hostile to the same Western powers that have historically supported the people of Burkina Faso with humanitarian and development assistance.
My Global Dispatches interview guest today, Jan Egeland, is the president of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a large international humanitarian NGO. Each year, the NRC publishes a list of what it considers the most neglected humanitarian emergencies on the planet, and this year, the crisis in Burkina Faso tops the list. Jan Egeland recently returned from Burkina Faso, and in our conversation, he explains why the humanitarian crisis there is so challenging and what can be done to make Burkina Faso less neglected by the international community.
This Global Dispatches podcast episode is freely available across all podcast listening platforms. The full transcript is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers.
Also: in case you missed it, Jan Egeland appeared on the debut episode of To Save Us From Hell, our new podcast about the United Nations last week! Prior to leading the Norwegian Refugee Council, he served as the top humanitarian official at the United Nations. The current occupant of that job, Martin Griffiths, is leaving at the end of the month so Jan Egeland offered some personal advice for the next Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. It was a great interview that we put at the end of our first episode. Please do check out To Save Us From Hell!
Transcript edited for clarity
Mark Leon Goldberg: So Jan, thank you so much for speaking with me. Before we get into the humanitarian crisis in Burkina Faso and why it’s the most neglected crisis in the world, can I have you explain how Burkina Faso descended into conflict in 2019 and what that conflict looks like today?
Jan Egeland: Burkina Faso was called Upper Volta some years back, I remember from my own youth. It was a quiet place in the heart of Africa. It was seen as stable. It was a favorite place of development agencies. There was hardly any humanitarian group dealing with emergencies because there wasn’t that much emergencies and there was no war. We, in the Norwegian Refugee Council, were active in Burkina Faso because we were aiding Mali and refugees from the civil war next door in Mali. Then in 2018, 2019, various armed groups started to be active in Burkina Faso.
Some came from the neighboring countries. Some had a jihadist agenda, some were extremists, some seemed to spring out of ethnic groups. And there was a harsh military response. Then there was more violence, and this action-reaction. Burkina Faso went from being a most stable place with no internally displaced people, to having the most rapidly growing internal displacement on earth, when I was there the first time in early 2020.
Mark Leon Goldberg: And there does seem to be this malignant relationship between jihadist violence and political instability in which the violence begets a coup and coups beget more violence.
Jan Egeland: Burkina Faso is now one in this string of nations in the Sahel, the string of countries just south of the Sahara Desert in Northern Africa. All of these countries have now military regimes — Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso. And there is a real problem because the traditional donors of ours, Western powers — U.S., Canada, the Europeans, European Union, the Scandinavians, the Germans, the French, the Brits — they all have broken relations, or relatively broken relations to a varying degree with these central Sahelian countries where the crisis is deep, people are suffering, and we as humanitarians feel pretty much left alone to deal with the suffering of the civilian population.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So let me ask, what does the conflict in Burkina Faso look like for civilians? How has it impacted civilians? I know you were there recently. How does the civilian impact of this crisis compare to others in the region, or throughout the world, that you’ve visited and that you’ve confronted?
Jan Egeland: It is terrible really. And what distinguishes it from other places with millions of people displaced is this total neglect — I mean, who knows that there is rampant armed conflict that kills thousands of people, displaces millions of people, and causes other millions of people going hungry? Who knows that that happens in the heart of Africa, in Burkina Faso? Very few. So, it’s this neglect and forgottenness that distinguishes the crisis in Burkina Faso.
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