What challenges does the region face? While it has historically been largely arid and difficult area in which to survive, the situation has worsened manifold since the region experienced its worst drought for decades in 2010. The impact to agriculture and livelihoods has stressed governmental services and in concert with spiking inflation and a coup in Mali, it has allowed a new sort of terrorism to flourish. The UN has organized several missions in the region in hopes of stabilizing the situation but has met with limited success. While billions of dollars have been poured into the region to date, the violence is worse than ever, refugees and internally displaced peoples (IDPs) have topped 1 million, and the cost in terms of human suffering remains staggering.

Multilateral Initiatives When trying to understand the challenges and why the UN is trying to help the region, it is useful to understand what is meant by state fragility. Arguably, the role of the state, in part, is to provide services to its citizens thus protecting them from environmental, political, economic shocks and other forms of destabilizing influences. If true, then the legitimacy of a state can be defined in part as the state's ability to provide social services such as sanitation, food, water, health, and education in addition to supporting markets where goods can be bought and sold and, perhaps most importantly for the state, taxed. If a state is fragile, it is often less able to provide these services and secure the money it needs to run. This is where, for the Sahel, the UN has stepped in.

Using "fragility" to assess international aid Essential concepts such as fragility and its correlates are featured centrally by most every multilateral policy creation organization such as the IMF, World Bank, United Nations, G5 Sahel, Sahel Alliance et. al. When assessing a country's progress or aid requirements. It would be useful therefore to have a common definition. Surprisingly, none exists. That said, organizations like the UN rely, in part, on generalizing measures like "The Fragile States Index" which we will revisit later. These metrics or "indicators" measure critical aspects of these countries and, because all indicators exist for all countries, allow you to compare things like infrastructure between one country and its neighbors.

Read more about Sahel's challenges here.

Climate This Western area of the Sahel is largely subject to, and dependent on the rains of the yearly monsoon. The warming of the land encourages the flow a humidity from the ocean and the potential of rain which typically arrives typically between July through August. Many crops although reasonably resilient are still functioning in the upper bounds of their limitations. In this way even small variances in rainfall to have far-ranging effects since it is estimated that 70% of the region relies on the rain to survive. since the 1950s the region has experienced rainfall instability postulated to at least in part be the result of increase climate change precipitating technologies leading to an increase in density of air particulates. in the more than two decades spanning from 1970 to 1993, 20 years of drought were experienced regionally. Since this point the weather has been harder to forecast with what years followed by extremely dry ones making forecasting and agricultural planning extremely difficult. Climatologists have worried that this instability could lead to a circular chain of events where when the land has less vegetation on it it will reflect more sunlight. This would in turn diminish the temperature difference between the land and the sea and in so doing we can the drawing in of humid are so crucial to a healthy monsoon. Additionally, experts agree that this process has been exacerbated by poor farming techniques, overgrazing, lack of a coherent and regional environmental policy, and deforestation. The situation was made dramatically worse in 2010 when the entire region was affected by a massive heat wave and drought. Temperatures spiked beyond 120F in some towns during this period. As a result crop yields were massively slashed as well as similar numbers for livestock production. Lake Chad a key water reservoir serving populations of more than 20 million people in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria has over the last 40 years seen its water availability shrink by 90%. Due to unsustainable water extraction and the current climate experts suggest the lake is unlikely to ever return to its previous levels without human intervention. Economies Closely related to climate is the damaged the monsoon instability had on the Sahel regions employment numbers. across the entire region agriculture is the largest employer. It is estimated to contribute as much as 45% of the GDP of some countries in the region. Also, between 2007 and 2008 world markets experienced surging food prices as a result of the deprecation of the US dollar, market speculation, and other contributors. The effects of this were disproportionately felt by the world's poor populations. In the Sahara where some countries have household expenditures ranging between 40% and 70% devoted for food purchasing, the effects were severe. By one estimate in Burkina Faso, prices for millet rose 40% between 2007 and 2008. in the aftermath of the price spike, as trading stabilized for much of the first world, prices in much of the developing world including the Sahel remained high regardless. Politics As with Mali a reduced capacity to provide services and protections challenged the legitimacy of many states in the Sahel region. Opportunists and terrorists alike leveraged the regional porosity of borders which the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime reports has generated 3.8 billion annually throughout the Sahel while relying on the propagation of illicit products from criminal networks and drug traffickers. Population Numbers for the Sahel can sometimes be difficult to estimate due to spotty local reporting, the fact that the Sahel is not delineated by state boundaries, and the presence of large numbers of nomadic pastoralists. That said, excluding northern Nigeria between 1950 and 2010 populations are reported to have more than tripled, exceeding more than a hundred million people in total. A burgeoning youth demographic saw countries like Burkina Faso hit a population median age of just 17 years, in comparison with 37.2 years for the United States. This situation further disrupted already stressed education services, job markets, and food supplies. Across most of the region fertility rates remain high while child mortality rates have sunk. Forms of family planning are not incentivized and education programs, while some exist, must contend with underfunded research initiatives and an inability to generate and roll out new programs. This impacts most notably the use of contraception which rates among the lowest in the world. From the perspective of the UN, sustainable development is defined as one that does not impair the livelihoods of future generations. While proponents of this idea would suggest that curbing population growth is central to the concept of stability the region, it is not expected to achieve zero population growth before 2100.

Increasing Violence The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project has created and maintains a trusted, free to use, data set that catalogs "dates actors type of violence locations and fatalities of all reported political violence and protest" in Africa and around the world. Additionally, they author an annual report which encourages stakeholders to learn about crucial conflicts which are often underreported in popular media. most recently in their "Ten Conflicts to Worry About in 2019" the Sahel region was singled out and brought to the fore as being "most likely to be the geopolitical Dilemma of 2019"

Among other countries the report focuses on the Resurgence of militant activity and conflict in Mali as well as the increasing activities of community-based militias and farmer and herder conflicts which are often involve issues such as access to resources and selectively favorable government policy.

Regional Terrorism Particularly the terrorists in the area present new challenges to governance in that their activities are not always demarcated by national borders. The Islamic State for its part expressly asserts that they do not wish to govern within borders, instead asserting that their their sovereignty of the caliphate is bounded only by those who accept the bayat (pledge) which includes all believers in all countries wherever they might reside. In creating a unified identity for followers of Islam they have become centrally inspirational to their following. This gave rise to the phenomena of the transnational fighter who was formed "from the junction between globalised communications/transportation technology and violent dynamics".

Up to about six years ago their presence within these fighting forces was seen as simply anomalous. In fact, it wasn't until around 2013 that a term for transnationally mobilized fighters even came into the discourse in political science literature making the phenomena even more difficult to study. Subsequent to this, it has been determined that these selfsame fighters are responsible for greater degrees of violence making those organizations that employ them disproportionately successful. Regionally this has supported the rise of so-called mezzanine rulers who, in collapsed States or States suffering from legitimacy problems and accompanying governance vacuums, endeavor to inject themselves between the government and the people by providing sporadic governance and services.

Fragile States Index: One methodology for codifying fragility. As mentioned, organizations like the UN in concert with World Bank et. al. have, in part, used a the measure of a country's fragility to justify taking action. While fragility can be assessed in many ways, one popular way is to use composite scores to rank vital parts of a state's health. One such scoring methodology used by several multilateral organizations is assembled by the "Fund for Peace".

Generalized grades for all countries The "Fund for Peace"(FFP) creates methodologies and data for the assessment different modes of state fragility and is known as the Fragile States Index (FSI). Such indicator sets are very useful because different countries measure very different things about themselves in very different ways and what they measure may change over time. The FSI does the work of generalizing and normalizing so countries can be compared to one another and a single country can compare its progress over time.

The Categories The FSI is divided into four major rubrics and are scored between 1-10, with lower numbers being better. The categories used are cohesion, economic, political, and social and cross-cutting indicators. These grades, taken together, are enumerations of various social, economic, and political pressures faced by a country. The more fragile a country is, the higher its rank is. Each of these indicators in turn, are composed of 3 sub-indicators. It is worth noting here that even the FFP asserts that their indicators are non-exhaustive and are "intended only as an entry point for further interpretive analysis by the user".

With the tool above you can explore how an organization like the UN may choose to operationalize a definition of fragility. While most of the measures get worse for most countries between 2007 and 2018, the declines of Mali, Gambia, and Senegal are the most dramatic. If you want to dig deeper, choose a country and hover over the left graph. This will show the sub-categories for each major fragility rubric. You can select a different rubric by hovering over its name and lastly see the rubrics score by hovering over the blue dots.

Read more about the FSI's rubrics here.

Cohesion
The cohesion indicator focuses on how power is leveraged to potentially disenfranchise a population and contribute to perceived state legitimacy. It measures violence and force in a multiplicity of forms. Most useful for this discussion is an account of militias a police force or military attempting to overthrow a rightful government, or a government or using the same to repress a population or proponents of a competing political party. Acts of terror, banditry and vigilantism of course covered as well as criminality both organized and not, making it extremely relevant for measuring the effect of the illicit trade within the Sahel.

Economic
The economic indicator is a composite of themes which in their most general sense are assays of the overall tendency of the market for the last year but also takes into account other less direct phenomena. As might be expected, GDP and public sector debt figure centrally. Additionally, measures of inflation and interest rates, employment numbers, and confidence levels both from trained economist and the citizenry.

Political
The political domain externally quantifies state legitimacy, with regards to service and infrastructural equity, and access to a common rule of law. Purporting to assiduously avoid evaluating legitimacy in terms of democratic ideals, legitimacy is divided into one of two buckets. In the first come concepts of electoral veracity. Are elections orderly and do they reflect the will of the people or are only a select few encouraged to vote, while others find it unreasonably difficult to do so or engage in boycotts? Do transitions in government take place at all and, if not, are those in power representative of their populations? Are those in power administrating in a transparent fashion or is political capital fortified and solidified by endemic types of corruption such as nepotism, oligarchies, end embezzlement? Public confidence in these institutions and methodologies of course relevant here as well as manifestations of the converse such as sustained protests, acts of civil disobedience and at the extreme end, the rise of insurgencies that may hope to disrupt governance processes.

Social & Cross Cutting
The first component of this indicator is a measure of demographic pressures which is further subdivided into one of two forms; pressures from the citizenry and from geography. While the first considers issues such as population explosions resulting in a large youth demographic, or sustainable population growth with regards to available resources, the letter quantifies what this paper has formally referred "shocks" and will for the purposes of the Sahel analysis be used to explore the result of large scale environmental disruptions such as the region-wide drought.

To read more about the sub-indicators, visit the FFP website

The Goals In response to state fragility, the UN has organized an enormous umbrella initiative composed of development goals with wide ranging aspirations. The most recent are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which began in 2016 and continue till 2030. In contrast to its predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals, (MDGs 2000-2015) which had 8 goals and 21 targets, the SDGs, consist of 17 different goals which in turn include 169 targets. Perhaps most notable is that all 17 are considered applicable for all countries as opposed to the MDG exclusive focus on poor or underdeveloped countries. In moving from the MDGs to the SDGs the goal creation methodology has also changed radically. Where as the MDG goals were created at the UN by a small team of experts the SDGs began with a working group of 30 individuals who in turn represented 70 different countries. By and large the SDGs are considered a much more comprehensive and nuanced set of goals considering the complex interdependencies of development as it relates to poverty including global trade and consumption.

Having more than double the scope a previous initiatives however does of course have an effect on the financials. The SDGs are estimated to be radically more resource intensive costing as much as 4.5 trillion per year in state spending investment and a packages.

SDG Funding Gap "Financing has not kept pace with the enormity of the challenges and the needs of the region and the specific countries." World wide, the budget shortfall for the SDGs is considered to be around 2.5 trillion. Implementation in the Sahel alone is projected to be as high as 157 billion dollars between 2018 and 2022.

A 2018 briefing to the G5 Sahel Joint Force detailed that a critical pillar of SDG implementation known as MINUSMA reported a funding gap of nearly 30 million dollars in 2018 alone. The head of United Nations peacekeeping operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix was quoted as saying, "State authorities, which oversee vast parts of national territories in the region, are fragmented, driven by a lack of government presence – including absence of basic services and facilities – resulting in ungoverned territories which have become hotspots for conflicts and violent extremism." adding “In the absence of funding, there is not much the Mission can do.”

Reconceptualizing fragility Perhaps even more importantly is how the interpretation of these goals has changed over time as different types of fragility have re-evaluated. The UN's 2018 support plan includes a sizable change in focus from security (read: combating terrorism) to providing services that legitimize rightful governments. In their report they admit that in failing to correctly tailor policy to the needs of the people, they have allowed violent extremism and transnational crime syndicates in the region to flourish.

Wicked Policy Wicked problems are problems that are often difficult or impossible to remedy because of a lack of data, intricate dependencies and contingent aspects that make solutions (in this case Sahel policy) difficult to formulate. What is important here is that the UN was only able to pivot from a previous policy decision because they were informed. In this case the availability of data regarding crime was critical. This sort of information will be the focus of the last section where you can look at how the UN grades itself.

Measurement The 2018 Support Plan for the Sahel devotes a single page out of 56 for the topic of measurement. Equally a problem of both the MDGs and the SDGs is that of quantifying progress. As late as 2017 the Brookings Institute released a report on the state of data availability in Africa saying that of the 232 indicators used by the SDGs 62% remain untrackable on average due to lack of data. They continue saying, "According to the report, only 12 of Africa’s 54 countries have autonomous statistics offices. In addition, Africa’s national statistics offices have often been inhibited by insufficient funding and a lack of autonomy. Data quality is also a challenge, according to the report, due to differences in methodologies and a lack of coordination across national statistics systems."

SDG Indicators The UN has curated the list of indicators featured above and assembled from different sources. This section provides an interactive look at how regional policy is informed through hard data.

Unfortunately, as the Brookings report suggests, there still exist goals of poor quality or without sufficient metrics. This is most clear when viewing the data for each country separately (left button), and will manifest as missing lines for one or more country or lines that have too few datapoints to be useful.