Declining harvests and dwindling fish hauls make Boko Haram appealing for young men in the Lake Chad region.
KOULKIMÉ, Chad — Alhadji Yaro was a teenager when Boko Haram militants stormed onto his island in the vast, blue-green waters of Lake Chad and made villagers an offer at gunpoint.
Climate change, they say, is reducing the economic prospects of young men in this part of Africa and making them more susceptible to recruitment by violent extremists. This dynamic reflects a broader finding by the United Nations this year that the opportunity for jobs, rather than religious ideology, is the main reason that people join extremist groups across Africa.
“Climate change didn’t cause this conflict, but it is compounding existing dimensions of the conflict,” said Janani Vivekananda, the head of climate diplomacy and security with About 700 families live in Koulkimé, and local leaders say that some 200 of them include former members of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram.
On the island of Koulfoua, where children played along the shores and women sold fish, Chief of the Canton Mahamat Ali Kongoi said a near-total lack of economic development has made the area fertile ground for extremist recruitment. Kongoi, the local leader, noted that few here make it past primary school and have no options but farming and fishing.
Chief of the Canton Mahamat Ali Kongoi, 43, on Koulfoua island, is in charge of a vast sweep of territory on Lake Chad near Nigeria. But sometime during his teenage years, Yaro said, he noticed that the seeds they planted no longer yielded as much as before. So he was already struggling to imagine a future before the flood wiped out his crops and Boko Haram arrived.
Back on Koulfoua, Hassan Mboduo, 50, said his brother joined the militant ISWAP group in 2019 because fish had become scarce in the lake, a phenomenon that both men blamed on changes in the weather. Mbodou said he begged his brother not to go. But his brother insisted. “‘I have to feed my family,’” Mbodou recalled his brother saying as he left.
Ali Abdallah, 40, said he and his brother had long tried to farm the dry land outside the village of Baga Sola. But after years of struggling to feed their families, relying mostly on money from the Irish nonprofit organization Concern Worldwide, the brothers decided in 2020 to start farming on the islands, despite the danger posed there by Boko Haram.
In Kousséri at Lake Chad on March 30, Kaka Koura, 40, said her husband was killed when he took the risk of fishing out on the lake where Boko Haram attacks are frequent. “He was desperate,” she said.
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