Stretching across Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, the Lake Chad Basin has experienced more than 15 years of conflict involving Boko Haram and its successor factions. Combined with widespread impoverishment, climate volatility, environmental degradation, limited state presence, weak public services and recurrent mass displacement, these dynamics have produced a protracted humanitarian crisis affecting millions across the region.

Over the same period, governments have sought to reassert their authority over crisis response, both through efforts to strengthen national coordination systems and through wider political, security, stabilisation and development agendas that place greater emphasis on national ownership and control. As humanitarian response has increasingly intersected with stabilisation, recovery and state-building agendas, the Basin provides an important opportunity to examine how state leadership is evolving in practice.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute