The coronavirus pandemic has people throughout the world pondering how humankind should respond to a public health crisis. While individual countries are managing the crisis with varying degrees of success, we can all agree that the Covid-19 pandemic is commanding the international community’s attention. By contrast, it is much harder to get the world to care about the long-term public health crisis unfolding in the West African Sahel.

The Western Sahel region—a cluster of arid, low-income countries stretching from Senegal, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, inland to Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Chad—is home to the world’s most youthful populations. According to current UN Population Division estimates, about 57 percent of this six-country region’s population is 19 years old or younger. As security conditions deteriorate across the rural Sahel, governments in Europe and North Africa are taking notice of these countries’ demographic status—and for good reasons. Sustained population youthfulness (often called a “youth bulge”) contributes to low levels of educational attainment, joblessness and social immobility, and ultimately to rapid population growth, which tends to drive declines in per-capita availability of freshwater and other critical natural resources: factors that are associated with the risk of persistent violent conflict and represent powerful push factors for migration.

While dismayed Americans watched the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation unfolding at the Mexican border, across the Atlantic, another shocking migration crisis continues to fester. Behind the grueling headlines of drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, migrants run a gauntlet of abuse through the Sahara desert to reach the Libyan coast. Armed militias and terrorist organizations across the Sahel profit by smuggling people displaced by climate, population, and security crises. While European policymakers struggle to cope with arrivals, their containment approach consistently disregards the root causes that force people to take such unimaginable risks. The high value of these human commodities not only exposes vulnerable migrants to torture, extortion, and even enslavement, but also provides funds for terrorist groups intent on attacking the West.

The epicenter of violence in the unstable country of Mali has historically been in the north, a contested region from where Touareg separatist and jihadist armed groups launched an insurgency against the state in 2012. But over the last two years, there has been a marked shift in communal and anti-state violence to the central region, and climate change may have played a role.