WATER POLITICS

States in western Africa’s Lake Chad region and international donors have pledged more than $500 million to help civilians threatened by jihadist insurgents and climate change, the organisers said on Friday.

The money pledged by the Lake Chad Basin High Level Conference will “support a coordinated, complementary and overall regional response to the crisis,” they said in a statement.

The conference — the third in the series — was held with UN support in Niamey, the capital of Niger, on Monday and Tuesday.

Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon border the vast marshy lake, which has been plagued by armed groups for nearly 13 years and is shrinking from the impact of global warming and a population surge.

The goal of the conference was “strengthening resilience” for inhabitants in the region.

Some 5.6 million people are believed to be at risk of severe food insecurity and around 2.9 million are internally displaced, including two million in Nigeria alone, according to the UN.

The first conference in Oslo in 2017 mustered $670 million in pledges, and the second in Berlin in 2018 $2.17 billion.

“Efforts have been undertaken… however, given the accelerating deterioration of living conditions, our measures seem to be very far removed from what is needed,” Nigerien Foreign Minister Hassoumi Massoudou said, quoted in the statement.