Sahel
ecoclimatic and biogeographic transition zone in Africa
The Sahel region (; from Arabic ساحل sāḥil [ˈsaːħil], "coast, shore"), or Sahelian acacia savanna, is a biogeographical region in Africa. It is the transition zone between the more humid Sudanian savannas to its south and the drier Sahara to the north. The Sahel has a hot semi-arid climate and stretches across the southernmost latitudes of North Africa between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. Although geographically located in the tropics, the Sahel does not have a tropical climate.
The Sahel has one of the world's fastest-growing populations due to its high human birthrate, with approximately 80 million people in 2018. The western Sahel in particular has experienced frequent food and water shortages due to droughts caused by its semi-arid climate, as well as high levels of government corruption. Since the 2010s, various coups, insurgencies, terrorist incidents, and foreign interventions have taken place across the Sahel and Françafrique, leading to the region being called the Coup Belt. As a result, the Sahel is viewed as both an ecoregion and a geopolitical space shaped by internal instability and external strategic competition.
Etymology
The term is borrowed from the Arabic name for the region, الساحل al-sāḥil. Sāḥil literally means "coast, shore", which has been explained as a figurative reference to the southern edge of the vast Sahara.
“Sahel” enters the record as ecoclimatic and biogeographic transition zone in Africa. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sahel, ecoclimatic and biogeographic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q66065. VIAF identifies the subject as 234147245. The Library of Congress control number is sh85116502. Authority coordinates are 14.475, 13.512. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sahel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.