Africa’s 2024 Security Trends in 10 Graphics

1. The Sahel Drives Record High Level of Militant Islamist Violence

• Militant Islamist group violent events and fatalities in Africa remained at all-time highs in 2024, primarily as a result of continued record levels of violence in the Sahel.
• The Sahel accounted for over half of all militant Islamist activity on the continent in 2024, with fatalities nearly tripling since 2020 to approximately 11,000. Groups like the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) have intensified attacks and expanded their territorial control in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as they push further south and west.
• Security forces in the Sahel, including allied militias and Russia’s Africa Corps forces, have escalated attacks against civilians. Between 2022 and 2024, such attacks increased by 76 percent, to over 400 incidents per year. Over the past 3 years, an estimated 4,740 civilians have been killed by these forces. In the past year, Sahelian military juntas and their allies have been responsible for more civilian deaths (2,430) than militant Islamist groups (2,050).
• The spillover from this escalation in the Sahelian countries is being felt in coastal West Africa where there have been over 500 violent extremist events in or within 50 km of their borders in 2024. This compares to just over 50 such events in 2020.

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2. Conflict Drives Africa’s Growing Forced Displacement Crisis

• The number of Africans forcibly displaced has risen for the 13th year in a row—to over 45 million people. This figure represents a 14-percent increase from the previous year.
• 14 of the top 15 countries in total number of forcibly displaced populations are in conflict.
• With 3 percent of its total population forcibly displaced, Africa has both a larger share and absolute number of forcibly displaced people than any other major region in the world.
• There has been a doubling in the forcibly displaced population in Africa since 2018. Three-quarters of these people—34.5 million—are internally displaced. Africa now hosts more than 48 percent of the world’s internally displaced people.

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3. Africa’s “Year of Elections” Presents a Split Screen

• Africa’s “year of elections”—with 19 national elections planned at the start of the year—generated a split-screen outcome.
• Authorities in five countries—including the military juntas of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea—did not feel obliged to even hold elections despite previously committing to do so. In another six countries, the elections that were held were heavily managed such that the outcome did not pass the threshold of a free and fair process—or a legitimating outcome.
• Eight African countries or territories did hold genuinely competitive elections—Senegal, South Africa, Mauritania, Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, Ghana, and the unrecognized territory of Somaliland. Incumbents held power in three of those cases, while the opposition gained a majority in the remainder. Each of those transfers of power went smoothly, sending a powerful message of the prospects for power sharing and democratic self-renewal on the continent.
• Notable in those transitions was the first transfer of power between parties since independence in Botswana and the creation of a government of national unity (GNU) in South Africa after the African National Congress lost its absolute parliamentary majority.

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4. Deteriorating Conditions under Military Juntas

• Military juntas in Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, and Mali uniformly delayed and derailed promised elections intended to transition back to democratic civilian rule in 2024, denying citizens a say in the trajectory of these countries. This follows an established pattern in Africa where over 70 percent of leaders who evade term limits initially came to power via military coup.
• Aside from blocking a resumption of participatory governance, these juntas have been linked to greater levels of repression against independent political actors and media, deteriorating security, and growing economic hardship.
• The deterioration of security under military rule in the Sahel has resulted in fatalities spiking threefold since 2020. In Niger, fatalities linked to extremist groups are projected to jump 60 percent in 2024. Militant groups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger continue to expand territories they control. Given dramatically shrinking space for media to report on the worsening security since the coups, the number of violent events and fatalities is likely underreported.

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5. External Authoritarian Actors Undermining African Democracy

• Foreign authoritarian actors—primarily Russia, China, and increasingly Iran—have helped facilitate the democratic backsliding witnessed in Africa in recent years. Through disinformation, direct election interference, deployment of mercenaries, support for extraconstitutional seizures of power, and undermining of the United Nations, these foreign actors have attempted to prop up undemocratic authorities and normalize authoritarianism while paralyzing popular sovereignty as a means of expanding their influence in Africa.
• Russia has sought to undercut democracy in at least 28 African countries spanning the continent. Information manipulation and political interference have been Russia’s most frequently used methods. These tools have likewise been deployed in Nigeria and Kenya in an attempt to hijack protests to undermine trust in government and democracy.
• China has become more active in promoting its dominant party model in Africa in recent years, advancing norms on the subservient role of the state, media, and military to the party. This trend was underscored by the opening of China’s first political school in Africa, expanded trainings for African party leaders, and an effort to shape Africa’s media environments.

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6. A Surge in Foreign Information Manipulation

• There has been a fourfold increase in disinformation campaigns (otherwise known as foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI)) targeting Africa since 2022. These campaigns continued to proliferate throughout 2024, particularly in Africa’s conflict zones.
• West Africa has emerged as the continent’s disinformation epicenter. Aided in their power grabs by FIMI, military juntas in the Sahel have become laboratories for Russia’s disinformation toolkit, which has paired with the juntas’ persecution of media to turn the region into a highly malleable information environment.
• Russian FIMI covertly tilts national debates in targeted countries (such as South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria), while the Kremlin-linked African Initiative has recruited local intermediaries to spread conspiracies about public health across the continent.
• FIMI sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party has leveraged its opaque control of African media to produce skewed and misleading coverage that is then amplified by Chinese disinformation campaigns.
• African democratic elections continued to be prime targets of disinformation campaigns, with countries like South Africa and Ghana facing an onslaught of false and misleading messagingby external actors. However, both countries took the threat seriously and began developing layers of resiliency to detect, analyze, and effectively alert and empower citizens and key stakeholders, including the media, in the face of these campaigns.

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7. Regional Implications from the Sudan Conflict

• The conflict between Sudan’s military factions has made the country the largest displacement crisis in the world. Over 11.5 million people have been internally displaced and more than 2.3 million people have fled the country since the start of the war in April 2023. Food shortages, including famine, are estimated to be killing hundreds of people a day, and an additional 3 million people are facing acute food insecurity in 2024.
• Sudan’s implosion has reverberated throughout the fragile region, compounding neighboring states’ own conflicts and political instability. The internal conflicts in Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Ethiopia are now further complicated by Sudan’s instability.
• Foreign powers, most notably the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Iran, and Egypt are inflaming Sudan’s conflict via the deployment of drones, munitions, mercenaries, and resource smuggling. This scramble for regional influence risks leaving Sudan a fragmented collection of client states that sidelines civilian voices and popular sovereignty.

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8. A Race to Protect the Congo Basin from Illegal Logging

• The Congo Basin rainforests represent roughly 70 percent of Africa’s forest cover and are the world’s most important terrestrial carbon sink. The Congo Basin is also integral to the water cycles supporting the Nile River Basin and West Africa. Yet, only 14 percent of its land cover has been granted protected status, and 30 percent of its forest cover has been lost since 2000, largely due to unregulated commercial logging and mining. Currently the forests are shrinking by 1 to 5 percent a year.
• Safeguarding the Congo Basin and its ecological resources and the millions of livelihoods it supports is a regional security imperative with implications for the continent and the planet. Transnational organized criminal networks and armed militant groups are taking advantage of weak forest management in the region to plunder this rich resource.
• Better management and protection of the Congo Basin will require enhanced forest domain awareness as well as better harmonizing the efforts of individual countries as part of a regional strategy to combat transnational crime and illicit financial flows.

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9. Maritime Vulnerability in the Red Sea and the Western Indian Ocean

• Over 100 piracy incidents and sabotage attacks in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean in 2024 exposed vulnerabilities in Africa’s maritime security. Houthi militia in Yemen and pirates operating from Somalia were the main source of these disruptions, which convulsed global shipping, sunk vessels, and damaged underwater cables.
• As a result of these attacks, African citizens paid the price through shipping delays, more expensive consumer goods, disruption to economies, and polluted waterways from munitions and sunken ship spills in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean.
• 2024’s Red Sea maritime crisis illustrates not only how the acts of what may seem a faraway nonstate actor can impact global economic dynamics but also the reality that Africa sits at the center of global shipping flows.
• Meanwhile, piracy and armed robbery at sea in the Gulf of Guinea declined in 2024 to their lowest levels in years, largely due to enhanced patrols and collaboration among participating members of the Yaoundé Protocol on maritime security.

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10. Famine and Floods Ravage the Continent

• Acute food security affected 163 million Africans in 2024, over one-tenth of the continent’s population. This total is nearly triple the number of 5 years ago, highlighting the rapid escalation in Africa’s food emergency.
• 80 percent of Africans facing acute food insecurity live in countries experiencing conflict with famine having been confirmed in Sudan and reported in parts of South Sudan and Mali.
• While Nigeria, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the countries with the greatest number of people confronting acute food insecurity—each with over 20 million people impacted—23 out of Africa’s 54 countries have at least 10 percent of their populations facing acute food insecurity.

• 27 countries in Africa’s tropical zone experienced unusually heavy rainfall in 2024 compared to their historical norms, resulting in thousands of fatalities, millions of displaced people, and millions of acres of inundated cropland.
• While extraordinary levels of rainfall across the tropical zone were the trigger, governance factors such as disaster coping capacity, transparency, and democracy were instrumental factors in mitigating the numbers of people affected by flooding.
• The compounding effects of natural disasters on weak governance are illustrated by the pattern of 13 of the 27 flood-affected countries also facing armed conflict. In addition to reflecting elevated levels of societal friction, conflict drains resources away from disaster resiliency and response measures that could be taken.