ReliefWeb

OVERVIEW

Many migrants report disappearances or deaths along migratory routes, including those from and within West and Central Africa (WCA) while attempting to cross the Sahara Desert and on the maritime route to the Canary Islands. While these anecdotal reports indicate that the death or disappearance of men, women and children along these routes is a daily reality, documenting these deaths is extremely challenging and data is highly incomplete in this part of Africa.

Despite many limitations in data collection, in 2021 IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP) recorded 110 deaths/disappearances during migration on routes in WCA: off the coasts of Mauritania, Cape Verde and Senegal en route to the Canary Islands and in Nigeria following a car accident. Senegalese, Guineans and Ivorians were among the few people with known information on nationalities who perished on these routes. This number of deaths in 2021 is lower than in 2020 when 429 deaths/disappearances on WCA routes were documented. Overall, these figures should be considered a real underestimate of the number of people who would have perished on the roads of WCA. Media coverage following these types of incidents is infrequent, and reports from authorities on deadly incidents involving nationals in transit in other countries simply do not exist. The rare data MMP possesses come from humanitarian partners who are in the field or are involved in search and rescue missions, as is done in Niger in collaboration with the governmental Directorate of Social Protection.