Desertification affects 45 percent of Africa’s land area, with more than half of that at very high risk of getting worse. The most severe hotspots stretch across the Sahel belt south of the Sahara, but significant land degradation is also advancing in East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of southern Africa around the Kalahari Desert.
The Sahel: Africa’s Most Affected Region
The Sahel is a semi-arid strip of land running east to west just south of the Sahara Desert, spanning parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. This zone has been the epicenter of Africa’s desertification crisis for decades. Rainfall here is erratic and soils are fragile, making the region especially vulnerable to both drought and human pressure.
Lake Chad, once one of the largest lakes in Africa, illustrates the scale of change in this region. It now covers roughly 1,350 square kilometers at its rainy-season peak and shrinks to as little as 10 percent of that during the dry season. Scientists warn that if the lake shrinks further or rainfall swings become more extreme, it could cross a tipping point where it can no longer sustain the surrounding communities, triggering rapid environmental and economic collapse across the basin.
The Sahel’s degradation has displaced millions. According to the Sahara and Sahel Observatory, approximately 46 million people have been directly affected by the broader land degradation crisis in the region, including 13.5 million internally displaced and over 4.5 million who sought refuge in other countries.
Southern Africa and the Kalahari
The Kalahari Desert, spanning large portions of Botswana and Namibia, is another major zone of concern. Although the Kalahari’s vast dune system is largely stabilized today, three decades of increasing agricultural activity and fence construction have driven heavy grazing pressure and severe shrub encroachment in many areas. In the southwest Kalahari, heavily grazed farmland now consists of bare, intermittently active dune crests that have visibly migrated within a single human lifetime.
Climate models project enhanced dune activity in the coming decades as temperatures rise. Parts of South Africa’s Northern Cape and Limpopo provinces face similar pressures, where dry conditions combine with intensive livestock farming to strip vegetation and expose soil to wind erosion.
East Africa and the Horn
Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Djibouti face some of the continent’s most acute desertification pressures. Recurring droughts, particularly in the lowland pastoral areas of northern Kenya and southeastern Ethiopia, have degraded rangeland that millions of herders depend on. Somalia’s central and northern regions lose vegetation cover steadily as drought cycles grow more frequent and recovery periods shrink. In Ethiopia, the Afar and Somali regions are especially vulnerable, with soil degradation reducing the land’s ability to hold water and support crops even when rain does arrive.
Why It Keeps Getting Worse
Desertification in Africa is primarily driven by people, not climate alone. The FAO identifies poverty combined with population pressure as the single biggest cause. As populations grow, farmers are pushed onto increasingly marginal land that cannot sustain cultivation. Soil is exhausted within a few seasons and then abandoned, leaving bare ground exposed to wind and rain erosion.
Deforestation amplifies the problem. Land is cleared mainly for agriculture, but uncontrolled logging, fuelwood gathering, fire, and overgrazing all contribute. When tree cover disappears, soil loses its anchor. In drier zones, this can permanently shift productive land toward desert conditions. Livestock numbers compound the damage: more animals on less land strips vegetation faster than it can regenerate, especially during drought years when herders concentrate around shrinking water sources.
What makes the current crisis different from historical dry periods is the collision of drought with these mounting human pressures. Droughts have always occurred across Africa’s arid and semi-arid zones, but the land once had enough resilience to recover. That buffer is disappearing.
A Complicated Signal From Dust Storms
One surprising finding complicates the picture. A 40-year analysis of dust storm frequency across North Africa, from 1984 to 2023, found that dust storms have actually declined significantly in both the Sahel and the Sahara. In the Sahel, increased rainfall and vegetation growth linked to ocean temperature cycles have suppressed dust, particularly during the pre-monsoon and monsoon seasons. In the Sahara, shifts in heat patterns and wind dynamics have had a similar dampening effect.
This doesn’t mean desertification is reversing. Localized greening in parts of the Sahel coexists with severe degradation elsewhere. Some areas that appear greener from satellite imagery are dominated by invasive shrubs rather than the diverse plant cover needed to support agriculture and grazing. The decline in dust activity reflects broad atmospheric patterns, not necessarily improvements in soil health or food production at ground level.
The Economic Cost
Up to 65 percent of Africa’s productive land is already degraded to some degree. The economic consequences are staggering. Between 1990 and 2015, cumulative land degradation reduced GDP per capita in Africa by an estimated 9 to 16 percentage points. Projections suggest that by 2040, desertification could cut GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa by an additional 10 percent, with reduced crop yields identified as the primary mechanism connecting land loss to economic decline.
For individual farming households, the math is more immediate. When soil fertility drops, yields fall, nutrition suffers, and families that were already on the economic margin lose their ability to feed themselves. This creates a cycle where poverty forces people to overuse the remaining productive land, accelerating the very process that impoverished them.