Africa accounts for 40 percent of global conflicts: ICRC

Members of the M23 armed group sit on a pickup truck during a patrol as women carrying fruits walk past a market, following the takeover of the city by the M23 movement in Bukavu on February 18, 2025. [AFP]

Africa accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world's armed conflicts, with some 50 ongoing clashes across the continent, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) vice-president told AFP Thursday.

The continent is home to roughly 1.4 billion people, and while it contains huge mineral wealth and the world's most youthful population, many parts of Africa remain mired in poverty and insecurity.

"We now have more than 50 active armed conflict situations in Africa," said the ICRC's Gilles Carbonnier.

This represents a 45 percent increase since 2020, he said, and accounts for "approximately 40 percent of total conflicts in the world".

"The humanitarian consequences are truly dramatic, because we have some 35 million people displaced due to these conflicts in African countries, and this represents almost half of the displaced people in the world," Carbonnier said.

It comes as the ICRC, like many other humanitarian organisations, faces a decline in funding due to massive aid cuts by the United States and other Western countries this year -- despite the "enormous" needs, he said.

In July, an international study revealed that the withdrawal of US aid could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 among the most vulnerable, a third of them children.

"This forces us to make very painful choices, where we must reduce, or even cease, some of our operations to prioritise others," Carbonnier said.

The most "worrying" situation is Sudan, he said, gripped by a civil war since April 2023.

Clashes between the regular army and the Rapid Support Forces have left tens of thousands dead, displaced nearly 12 million people, in what the United Nations calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

"We have a health system that is largely destroyed," he said, with the ICRC worried about the resurgence of cholera, malaria and dengue fever.

Carbonnier condemned the resurgence of fighting in Somalia, a Horn of Africa country still battling the militant Al-Shabaab group, and in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where violence has intensified since January with the capture of the major cities of Goma and Bukavu by the Kigali-backed M23 armed group.