Undernourishment in West Africa: the curve that worries

Hunger is receding worldwide. In Africa, it is rising. That is the paradox revealed by the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report: global undernourishment prevalence has edged down, but it crossed the 20% mark in Africa in 2024, affecting 307 million people. West Africa is not spared this divergence. For years its prevalence appeared to hold, at around 15% in 2022. This apparent stability masked an accumulation of fragilities that are now releasing all at once: more than 40 million people food insecure in West and Central Africa at the end of 2024, a projection of 52.7 million at the mid-2025 lean season, and above all a child malnutrition that mortgages the human capital of an entire generation. This article connects the available data not to describe yet another crisis, but to answer three questions that the regional aggregates obscure: where the curve is slipping, why, and how much inaction will cost.

A regional curve that is changing slope

The reference point is well established: 15% undernourishment prevalence in West Africa in 2022 (FAO, SOFI). At the continental scale, the trajectory is unambiguous. African prevalence rose from around 15% in the mid-2010s to a pandemic peak in 2020, then kept climbing to exceed 20% in 2024, against a global average that is, by contrast, falling back. In other words, the continent no longer follows the planetary trend: it is breaking away from it upward. The most striking break, however, shows in the absolute number of food insecure people in West and Central Africa: the move from more than 40 million (post-harvest 2024) to a projected 52.7 million (mid-2025 lean season) represents an increase of roughly 13 million people. Part of this gap reflects seasonality, the post-harvest measure corresponding to a period of abundance and the mid-2025 projection to the lean season. The structural signal lies elsewhere: the number of people in food emergency (Phase 4) jumped by 70% over the post-harvest season, and the lean-season projection (3.4 million) confirms a hard core of distress that is worsening.

Ghana proves the curve is not a fatality

Faced with such a heavy regional trend, the temptation is to read it as a structural curse, tied to climate or to Sahelian geography. The data say the opposite. Over a single generation, a coastal country in the region, Ghana, drove down chronic malnutrition among its children from 32.7% in 1993 to 17.3% in 2022, according to successive Demographic and Health Surveys. That is a near-halving in three decades, which today places Ghana 'on course' to meet the global stunting reduction target, well below the African average (30.7%). This counter-example is precious: it shows that with sustained economic growth, targeted nutrition programmes and regular statistical monitoring, the curve reverses. The slippage in the Sahel is therefore not a regional fatality; it is the product of shocks concentrated on specific territories. They simply have to be seen.

The Ghanaian data send a simple message to decision-makers: what the Sahel curves measure is not a geographic fatality, it is the imprint of shocks that can be located, and therefore fought.

Three drivers that multiply rather than add up

If the curve reverses in Ghana but collapses in the Sahel, it is because the deterioration is not down to a single cause but to the convergence of three forces. Armed conflict, first: West and Central Africa counted a record 12.7 million forcibly displaced people at mid-2025 (UNHCR), whose access to land and markets is severed. Economic instability next, with food price inflation that erodes purchasing power even in coastal areas once spared, in Senegal, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Climate shocks finally: the 2024 floods affected 7.5 million people across 18 countries in the region (OCHA). The decisive analytical point is that these three drivers do not add up, they multiply. A displaced household, facing rising prices and a flooded harvest, does not lose one buffer out of three: it loses them all at once, and tips over. It is this interaction, not the arithmetic sum of the shocks, that explains the brutality of local collapses.

• Conflict and displacement: 12.7 million forcibly displaced people at mid-2025, cut off from their land and markets (UNHCR).
• Food inflation: erosion of household purchasing power, including in coastal countries long spared (Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone).
• Climate shocks: 7.5 million people affected by the 2024 floods across 18 countries (OCHA), with destruction of crops and stocks.
• Multiplier effect: when the three shocks hit the same household, no buffer remains, hence the speed of slides into Phase 4.

The most serious slippage is among children

The most alarming figure is not average prevalence but child malnutrition. In 2024, 16.3 million children were expected to suffer from acute malnutrition in West and Central Africa, including 5 million in its severe, most lethal form (UNICEF, West and Central Africa). On top of these acute shocks comes a more silent affliction: chronic malnutrition (stunting), which durably compromises physical and cognitive development. National levels remain worrying: 47.7% of under-fives in Niger, 34.1% in Benin, 33.8% in Nigeria according to the most recent UNICEF-WHO-World Bank joint estimates. These are proportions that mortgage the human capital of an entire generation, and it is here that the true price of the curve is measured.

Niger and Mali, epicentres of acute malnutrition

When we drill down to the country level, the central Sahel concentrates a disproportionate share of the acute malnutrition burden. According to the most recent IPC analyses (2024-2025 window), close to 1.7 million children are affected in Niger and around 1.6 million in Mali, far ahead of Burkina Faso (about 426,000). This geography largely overlaps with that of conflict and displacement. But the appearance of Senegal (about 400,000 children) and Benin (about 200,000) in the picture confirms a worrying signal: the crisis, long confined to the Sahel, is now spilling over toward the coastal countries, where household purchasing power has eroded under the effect of food price inflation. The spillover is not a hypothesis: it is a measurement.

The cost of inaction: a silent amputation of GDP

The budget debate often pits the cost of nutritional treatment against constrained public finances. This framing is misleading, because it ignores the cost of doing nothing. The economic literature is now solid on this point. At the continental scale, the 'Cost of Hunger in Africa' study, led by the African Union with UNDP, UNECA and the WFP, has quantified country by country the losses tied to child undernutrition: they reach, for example, 10.3% of GDP in Malawi, and range from 2% (Egypt) to 17% (Ethiopia) depending on context. The mechanism is documented: between 1% and 18% of grade repetitions are associated with stunting, the children concerned accumulate up to 3.6 fewer years of schooling, and 40% to 67% of the working-age population suffered from stunting in childhood.

At the individual level, stunting translates into a lifetime income penalty. World Bank work (Galasso and Wagstaff) estimates this penalty at around 7% of per capita income on average, and at 9% to 10% for sub-Saharan Africa, owing to impaired cognitive development, shortened schooling and reduced adult stature. At the continental scale, the African Development Bank estimates that stunting alone costs Africa about 25 billion dollars per year. Applied to a West African cohort where, in some countries, nearly one child in two is affected, the order of magnitude is staggering: every year of inaction carves a productivity deficit into the economy of the next two decades. Undernutrition is not a social expense, it is a growth debt contracted on future generations.

What national averages hide

This whole demonstration rests on national averages. Yet in nutrition, the average is the enemy of the right decision. Ghana, with its 17.3% stunting, is officially 'on course'. But behind this enviable average lies a country split in two: 10% to 11% stunting in Greater Accra and the Eastern region, against 29% to 30% in the Northern regions. The same child, 600 kilometres apart, has nearly three times the risk of being stunted for life. A policy calibrated on Ghana's national average would deploy its resources where they are no longer needed, and abandon precisely the districts where the target is still far off. What the average masks are the pockets of crisis, and it is they that decide the outcome.

This is where CRAD's angle lies. Measuring undernourishment at the country level is useful for advocacy, but insufficient for action. The decision plays out at the level of the district, the commune, sometimes the production basin. Fine data, disaggregated by sex, age and territory, geolocated and updated at near-real-time pace, does not merely improve the precision of the diagnosis: it changes the very nature of the response. It makes it possible to pre-position therapeutic inputs ahead of the lean season in at-risk districts rather than after the peak across the whole country, to target social transfers on genuinely exposed households, and to measure a programme's effect where it is deployed. The Cadre Harmonisé and the IPC provide the regional framework; national nutrition monitoring and evaluation systems, fed by rigorous field data collection, are the missing link. This is precisely the chain CRAD builds, from the field to the dashboard.

A crisis that spares neither women nor budgets

Two blind spots complete this picture. The first is gender: malnutrition is largely transmitted through the nutritional health of mothers, and women carry out most of the food production and child care in the region. Data not disaggregated by sex renders invisible the decisive link of nutritional resilience. The second is financing: the United Nations children's agency and its partners warn of chronic underfunding of the response in West and Central Africa, at the very moment when needs are reaching record levels. The gap between the scale of the crisis (52.7 million people projected, 5 million children in severe acute malnutrition) and the resources mobilised is not an operational detail: it determines how many children will reach a treatment centre before it is too late. In severe acute malnutrition, the delay between diagnosis and treatment is not an adjustment variable, it is a survival variable.

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