Seasonal calendar — where in the year we are
These are facts with dates, not forecasts. A calendar cannot be wrong about what month it is. Nothing here fires an alert on its own; it tells you how to weigh everything else on the page. The same displacement figure means something different inside the lean season than outside it.
How to read this page
This is a sensor page. Every figure on it is counted by somebody else and carries that body's name and the date it was counted. Where a source did not report, the page says not reporting — it does not show a zero. A real zero and an unread zero are different facts.
The headline dial is BESIEGED POPULATION, not displacement stock. Roughly 800,000 people live inside encirclements they cannot leave. It is the only figure on the page that measures people to whom movement is unavailable, which is why it leads.
The second dial is DIRECTION. Four flows run at once: 2.1M still displaced, 1.14M recorded as returned, ~800K who cannot move, and ~51,000 who crossed into Mali. A country moving in every direction at once is not described by any single number, and the page deliberately refuses to pick one.
What the page will not do is tell you what the returnee figure means. Whether returns are voluntary, whether return areas are secure, and how the number is used politically are analyst questions. They belong on the rhetoric page.
The distributed siege — Djibo, Sebba, Titao
Mali's crisis is one strangled centre: the JNIM fuel blockade around Bamako. Burkina Faso's is dozens of simultaneous encirclements across the Sahel, Centre-Nord and Est regions — which is why the two countries' cards are shaped differently even though the insurgency is related.
Djibo (Soum province) has been blockaded since February 2022 — longer than most wars run — and is resupplied largely by air. Sebba and Titao have been surrounded since 2022 as well.
Roughly 40% of national territory sits outside effective government control. School closure is one of the few siege effects counted precisely, which makes it a usable proxy for that control: 5,300+ schools non-functional, 818,000+ children and 24,300 teachers affected. (ACAPS · Crisis Group · UNICEF)
Landlocked: the corridor dependency
Gold out, and fuel, fertiliser and food in, all move by road through four coastal neighbours: Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire — the historic artery, with a rail link), Tema (Ghana), Lomé (Togo) and Cotonou (Benin).
Burkina Faso left ECOWAS — the bloc governing those corridors — alongside Mali and Niger in January 2025. Insurgent expansion in the Est region runs toward the same Gulf of Guinea states the corridors terminate in.
The commodity revenue is real. The routes carrying it belong to other governments. That is the dependency, and it is the same shape as Kazakhstan's CPC exposure: a producer whose output has to cross somebody else's sovereignty to become money. (World Bank, Enhancing Burkina Faso Regional Connectivity; ECOWAS withdrawal Jan 2025)
The CFA franc peg — read the peg, not the tick
The West African CFA franc (XOF) is fixed to the euro at 655.957. Because the parity is fixed, XOF/USD moves only as EUR/USD moves. A daily change on that tile is a reading on Frankfurt, not on Ouagadougou.
The signal worth watching is the peg itself. AES members have publicly raised leaving the franc zone. That would be a rupture, not a drift, and it would show up on the tile as a regime change rather than as a percentage — which is why the tile carries a standing warning instead of an alert threshold. (BCEAO / UEMOA fixed parity)
Glossary
- AES — Alliance des États du Sahel
- Confederation of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, formed after the three juntas withdrew from ECOWAS (announced Jan 2024, effective Jan 2025).
- JNIM
- Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin — al-Qaeda-aligned coalition; the primary insurgency across Burkina Faso's north, east and increasingly the centre.
- ISGS / ISSP
- Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (Sahel Province). Operates in the eastern Liptako-Gourma tri-border area; its rivalry with JNIM produces inter-jihadist fighting that is its own distinct signal.
- Ansaroul Islam
- Burkinabè-origin armed group, active in Soum — the province containing Djibo.
- Liptako-Gourma
- The Mali–Niger–Burkina tri-border zone. The structural driver shared by all three AES states.
- Soudure (lean season)
- The hunger gap between the exhaustion of last year's stocks and the new harvest, June–September. Displacement that coincides with it removes a household's ability to plant, which is a second-order effect the stock figures do not capture.
- Meningitis belt
- The sub-Saharan band in which epidemic meningococcal disease is seasonal, December–May, peaking February–April. Crowded displacement sites are the exposure that converts seasonal risk into outbreak.
- SOPAMIB
- Société de Participation Minière du Burkina — state miner created in 2024, which took over the Boungou and Wahgnion mines.
- BRVM
- Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières — the single regional stock exchange for the eight UEMOA states. It sits in Abidjan: Burkinabè listed companies trade in the capital of a country Burkina Faso is now outside ECOWAS with.
- UEMOA / WAEMU
- West African Economic and Monetary Union — the eight-state CFA-franc zone.
- DTM
- IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix — the counted IDP figure, published in numbered rounds. The round number and reporting date are what make the figure citable.
- IPC
- Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — the 1-to-5 consensus scale for acute food insecurity.