Burkina Faso is facing one of the world’s fastest growing displacement crises threatening to engulf the entire West African country and spill over into neighboring Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Cote d’Ivoire, warns a report by the U.S.-based NGO Refugees International.
Burkina Faso has emerged as the latest epicenter of a conflict that has already consumed much of neighboring Mali and Niger in Africa’s troubled Sahel region, said Alexandra Lamarche, a Canadian humanitarian worker who authored the report for Refugees International.
And the speed at which the situation in Burkina Faso has deteriorated has caught the country’s government, the international community and aid groups off guard, Lamarche told Radio Canada International in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.
“I was in Burkina in the Fall and they estimated that by the end of the year there’d be about 330,000 internally displaced and instead by Dec. 31 they had reached numbers of 530,000 and now we’re at 613,000,” Lamarche she added.