Hunger in Mali is a logistics problem before it is a harvest problem — and the same insecurity that causes it blocks the response.
Open the full chain →Conflict coverage · Central Sahel
Humanitarian Overview
The central Sahel's humanitarian crisis is not a side-effect of the war; it is the medium the war is fought in. Blockades, sieges, road insecurity and communal violence produce the displacement, hunger and school closures — and the same insecurity blocks the response. Two things about the figures below matter as much as the figures. First, they are agency estimates at regional granularity and they revise often. Second, and more seriously, they are not equally current: Burkina Faso — which hosts roughly three quarters of the region's displaced people — has published no consolidated displacement count since March 2023, so the number still quoted for it in 2026 is three years old. Where that is the case this page says so beside the figure rather than at the bottom of it.
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Broad regional level only. Figures are agency estimates with their own as-of dates and revision cycles. This page never maps aid routes, facility locations or operational details — humanitarian data is presented so it cannot be used to target the response. Locations here are regional; no facility, warehouse, convoy route or aid schedule is published anywhere in this module.
~5.7 million
Region: displaced by end-2026 (projected)
2.1 million
Burkina Faso: internally displaced
~400,000 (2025)
Burkina Faso: new displacement per year
4.5 million (1.2m targeted)
Burkina Faso: people in need
5.1 million
Mali: people in need
3.8 million
Mali: people targeted for response
~415,000
Mali: internally displaced
737,000+
Mali: displaced in total, inside and outside
1.56 million people
Mali: acute food insecurity
227,000+ children
Mali: severe child malnutrition
~21% of US$771m
Mali: 2025 appeal funded
Where the displaced actually are, and how well it is counted — 2026-08
Roughly three quarters of the central Sahel's internally displaced people are in Burkina Faso — which is also the country whose figures are least current. Its consolidated count has not been officially updated since March 2023, when it stood at 2.1 million; that number is still quoted against 2026 datelines and is three years old. What has continued is flow data: about 400,000 newly displaced registered in 2025, similar to 2024, down from roughly 700,000 a year in 2022–2023. A falling flow against an unmeasured stock cannot be read as improvement, and this module does not read it that way. Mali's figures, by contrast, are current but measure two different populations — about 415,000 registered internally displaced, and more than 737,000 displaced inside and outside the country. Niger's displacement is not yet covered here at all. The honest summary is that the region's largest displacement crisis is its least well counted.
Displacement in Mali — 2026-08
Displacement is concentrated in the northern and central regions and moves with the fighting: the 2026 offensives displaced people from Kidal, Ménaka and the Mopti countryside, while earlier waves from the Ménaka region fled Islamic State Sahel's campaigns. Malian refugees have crossed into Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso — countries facing their own crises. Two figures are published on this page and they are not alternatives: roughly 415,000 people are registered as internally displaced, while more than 737,000 Malians are reported displaced inside and outside the country. The gap is the refugee population and the limits of registration, and reading either number alone understates or misattributes the movement. Mali's displaced are in turn a fraction of the central Sahel's ~2.8 million, which is itself the point: this is one regional emergency, not three national ones.
Food security — 2026
Hunger here is a logistics problem before it is a harvest problem. The fuel blockade raised transport costs and cut market supply nationwide; road insecurity strands harvests away from the towns that need them; village blockades in the Niono and Mopti areas cut farmers from fields at planting and harvest. Pockets of famine-like conditions have been reported in northern areas, and malnutrition rates are worst among the displaced.
Humanitarian access — 2026
Access is the binding constraint. Roads are mined and ambushed, armed groups tax or block movement, and authorisation regimes are slow; agencies negotiate passage with whoever holds each stretch of road. Access constraints also mean the figures on this page are floors, not ceilings — the least reachable areas are the least counted. This module deliberately maps humanitarian data at broad regional level only.
Services under the war — 2026
Thousands of schools have closed across the central and northern regions, from direct threats, teacher displacement and insecurity — a generation's education traded for the war's duration. Health facilities in contested areas run intermittently or not at all, on supply chains that depend on the same roads everything else does.
Civilian protection — 2026-08
Civilians are targeted from several directions at once: jihadist attacks and blockades; Islamic State Sahel's massacres in the tri-border zone; communal militia violence and reprisal, as at Ogossagou; and documented abuses in state and Russian-partnered operations, of which Moura in 2022 remains the gravest. Contested drone strikes near Tinzaouatène have added a further category. Air strikes are now the growing part of that file: an investigation published on 31 July 2026 reported that Africa Corps strikes on the village of Kyrnia, in the Mopti region, on 15 June 2026 killed eight civilians including three children, at a village chief's residence and a cattle market. The pattern the case illustrates matters beyond the incident — treating an armed group's presence in or control of a settlement as sufficient grounds to strike civilian locations within it. Legal characterisations of individual strikes are recorded as the findings of the organisations that make them; official investigations into these cases are rare. No party to this war is a clean actor in it.
Climate shocks — 2026
Rainfall variability, drought and flooding compound every other pressure, and the farmer–herder competition they sharpen is one of the insurgency's oldest recruiting grounds. Climate is not a separate crisis here — it is an accelerant of the conflict's existing fault lines.
Blockade and food prices
Fuel availability drives transport costs, which drive food prices in Bamako, Ségou and Kayes. Watch price series and market supply, not just attack counts.
Displacement from the north
Whether the 2026 fighting around Kidal, Anéfis and Ménaka produces sustained outflows toward Mauritania, Niger and Algeria.
The funding gap
The 2025 appeal drew ~21% of requirements. Watch whether 2026 funding improves, and what agencies cut when it does not.
Access negotiation
Whether agencies can keep negotiating passage with armed groups as control fragments further — the difference between a counted crisis and an invisible one.
Each chain traces a mechanism step by step and grades how firmly each step is established. They describe conditions and imply no operational humanitarian coordination.
Access depends on:Mali's fuel import corridors
Confidence: ModerateData as of 2026-08Sources: UN OCHA humanitarian reporting (Mali / Sahel) · UNHCR operational data (Mali situation) · World Food Programme assessments · Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect — country monitoring · Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa) · International Crisis Group · ACLED conflict data & analysis · Human Rights Watch investigationsMethodology
Changed in brief2026-08-02 · Humanitarian updated