Regional Protection Working Group WCA - Sustaining Protection Under Pressure: The Impact of Humanitarian Funding Cuts on Protection Programming in West and Central Africa

West and Central Africa accounts for over 12 million forcibly displaced persons, 80% of whom are women and children. The Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, Western Niger) and the Lake Chad Basin (Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon) are experiencing complex humanitarian crises, with protection risks and related needs escalating due to conflict, increasing forced displacement and climate shocks. There are over 165,000 refugees and asylum-seekers hosted in the northern parts of the coastal countries of the Gulf of Guinea due to spillover of the conflict in the Sahel. Sudan is grappling with the largest humanitarian crisis in the world which continues to drive displacement into Chad and the Central African Republic. Chad has received nearly one million new Sudanese refugees since April 2023; refugees now account for 1 in every 3 people in eastern Chad.

The trend of reductions in humanitarian funding in recent years has been accelerated by sudden cuts by major donors in 2025, with devastating consequences for the delivery of core life-saving protection activities across conflict zones and displacement situations in the region. The suspension of case management and protection services, the closure of safe spaces for women and children, and the reduction in protection monitoring capacity and community-based protection interventions have left populations already affected by protection risks increasingly exposed to violence, exploitation, and neglect. Communities are losing the ability to prevent and respond to threats, eroding community-based systems that have been built over years of investment. National systems, local NGOs, and frontline workers are overwhelmed or dismantled.

As responses become increasingly fragmented, protection actors risk losing their ability to engage with longer-term efforts and the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Without urgent investment to sustain them, the remaining protection services may eventually disappear across the region. The current funding crisis in West and Central Africa is not just a funding gap: it is the erosion of the entire humanitarian protection environment.