The world’s most complex humanitarian disaster: the Lake Chad crisis

A severe humanitarian crisis is under way in the Lake Chad basin. Over two million refugees, five million people at risk of food insecurity and 500,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition. Two factors have caused what the New Yorker has defined as ''the world’s most complex humanitarian disaster'': the desertification of the Lake, which in the last 50 years has lost 90% of its surface, and the terrorism of Boko Haram, which has turned the basin of the lake into the final frontier of the jihad in Africa.