A Region Caught in Three Crises at Once
Before unpacking what Phase 3 will do, it helps to understand what it is up against.
The Sahel faces some of the world’s most complex and interconnected challenges, including rapid population growth, deep-rooted inequality, widespread food insecurity, fragility, conflict, and displacement.
The climate picture is especially grim. According to the United Nations Development Programme, temperatures across Sahel countries are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average, and over 80 per cent of the territory is already affected by desertification.
The World Bank’s own programme overview confirms that roughly 80 per cent of the Sahel’s farmland is degraded, and in a region where over 40 per cent of the population already live below the poverty line, shocks can further contribute to poverty persistence.
The growing environmental collapse is one of the core reasons Sahel adaptive social protection programmes are increasingly being treated as long-term economic stabilisation tools rather than temporary welfare interventions.
Then there is conflict. More than 600,000 Sudanese refugees have crossed into eastern Chad since civil war broke out in Sudan in 2023, according to the SASPP Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report. Local communities have been swamped. Food, shelter, and medical supplies were already stretched before the influx arrived.
Further west, the SASPP Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report documents a food insecurity picture in northern Mali and Burkina Faso that now surpasses even the record levels of 2024. Armed conflict keeps displacing farming communities and shutting down agricultural land. A sharp pullback in humanitarian funding by major international partners has removed what little cushion remained.
Why Reactive Aid Has Stopped Working
Traditional foreign aid follows a simple, broken logic. A drought hits, crops fail, and food parcels arrive weeks or months later. By then, families have already sold their livestock, pulled children from school, and borrowed money they may never repay.
The World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection model rejects that sequence entirely. Instead, Sahel adaptive social protection systems aim to intervene before households are forced into distress coping mechanisms such as selling livestock or abandoning farms.
The World Bank describes the programme’s core delivery as three interlocking interventions: social safety nets, economic inclusion, and temporary shock response, all with a deliberate focus on women and young people. Where it differs from conventional aid is in how those tools connect. Skills training links to cash transfers. Cash transfers link to early-warning systems. Each component is meant to reinforce the others rather than operate in isolation.
The word “adaptive” carries real operational weight here. National registries are fed data on weather patterns, market prices, and displacement movements, giving governments the information they need to release payments before a drought or flood fully takes hold. The goal is to put resources in people’s hands during the warning window, not after the damage is done.
Senegal demonstrated this during the COVID-19 pandemic. The SASPP contributed to the Senegalese government’s exceptional monetary transfer operation, which reached all 550,000 households in the Single National Registry to help poor households cope with the economic consequences of the pandemic and the sharp inflation crisis, rolling out the response through adaptive social protection systems and demonstrating their importance for both regular and shock-responsive programmes.
What Phase 3 Actually Builds
The World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection programme’s third phase rests on three practical pillars.
The first is smarter registries. Phase 3 will focus on strengthening core national systems by enhancing social registries, digital payment mechanisms, secure data platforms, and institutional frameworks that support employment, inclusion, and resilience.
In Burkina Faso, that work is already producing results. Building on the 277,000 households registered with SASPP support, contributions from the European Union and the World Food Programme brought the total number of poor households included in the registry to 344,400 as of June 2025, with work under way to link the social registry with internally displaced persons databases and the unique identifier system being developed through the World Bank-funded WURI project.
In Senegal, the ambition is even larger. The country’s social registry has achieved national coverage of over 540,000 households and aims to expand to one million households, with the goal of including all poor and vulnerable households.
Expanding digital registries has become a central pillar of Sahel adaptive social protection efforts across the region as governments attempt to build faster and more targeted crisis responses.
The second pillar is productive inclusion. Cash transfers keep families fed in the short term, but the World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection approach goes further by investing in skills and livelihoods.
The productive inclusion component reached over 50,000 beneficiaries across four countries during its pilot phase, with several countries now in the process of scaling up the programme following positive evaluations. Women and young people receive training in livestock management, non-agricultural income generation, and digital skills, reducing their dependence on rain-fed farming at a time when rain itself is becoming unreliable.
The third pillar is institutional resilience. The programme invests in digital identity systems and mobile money infrastructure so that aid continues to reach individuals even when central governments are in a state of political flux.
A Programme Designed to Outlast Political Instability
This is where Phase 3 makes its most pointed argument.
Several SASPP countries have experienced military coups or transitions in recent years. Conventional aid programmes stall when governments change. The World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection model is designed to work around that problem by embedding delivery systems at the community and individual level rather than routing everything through ministries.
Phase 3 will prioritise testing proven safety nets, economic inclusion, and shock-responsive interventions to help households stabilise, invest, and engage in income-generating opportunities, while seeking to mobilise financing and partnerships by aligning development frameworks.
The programme also relies heavily on local community leaders in areas where international staff cannot safely operate, a structural recognition that security gaps will remain a feature of the landscape for years to come.
Analysts say Sahel adaptive social protection mechanisms may become increasingly important as insecurity continues limiting the physical reach of international humanitarian organisations.
The Honest Obstacles
The World Bank does not pretend the path ahead is clear.
Security remains the most stubborn barrier. You cannot register a household in a village under threat of attack. The SASPP’s own 2024 policy note, examining operational lessons from Burkina Faso, acknowledged that delivering adaptive social protection in fragile, conflict, and violent contexts requires adapted approaches that conventional programmes were not built for.
Data is the second constraint. The World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection system depends on real-time information, including weather readings, market prices, and displacement maps. Across much of the six target countries, that data remains patchy or out of date, making it harder to trigger payments with precision.
To measure progress against these challenges, the SASPP conducted stress tests across all six countries in 2021 and 2022, summarising findings in its 2023 flagship publication “Stress Testing Adaptive Social Protection Systems in the Sahel.”
According to the SASPP Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report, the stress tests were replicated at the end of FY25 in partnership with the World Food Programme and UNICEF, with the comparison providing critical insights into where progress has been most marked and where additional investment is required.
Backed by European Governments, Guided by a Decade of Evidence
SASPP is a multi-donor trust fund managed by the World Bank, supported by the governments of Denmark, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) features among the named donors in the programme’s Fiscal Year 2025 Annual Report, alongside Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and France’s Agence française de Développement.
Since its launch in 2014, SASPP has allocated more than US$277 million to government investments, technical assistance, knowledge, capacity, and consensus-building for nationally owned adaptive social protection in the Sahel, with Phase 2 alone delivering US$175.7 million.
Marina Wes, the World Bank’s Director for Strategy and Operations for Western and Central Africa, put the purpose plainly at the Phase 3 launch. “The challenges facing the Sahel are immense, but not insurmountable. Adaptive social protection has demonstrated its capacity to connect the most vulnerable to real economic opportunities, building human capital and pathways to better jobs,” she said. “By investing in strong national systems, governments can deliver these results at scale, driving inclusive growth and supporting peace and stability through job creation.”
The Argument Behind the Investment
The launch of Phase 3 carries an admission that runs through every page of the programme documents.
Emergency relief alone has failed the Sahel. Decade after decade of food parcels and disaster responses has not broken the cycle of poverty, displacement, and hunger. The World Bank Sahel adaptive social protection programme represents a structural wager: that building a digital and financial buffer around the region’s most vulnerable citizens, one that can withstand coups, droughts, floods, and insurgencies, is the only path that avoids a permanent humanitarian emergency.
With almost two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor expected to live in fragile and conflict-affected countries by 2030, the need to build adaptive, inclusive social safety nets is rapidly accelerating.
The next five years will show whether that wager pays off.
