The world's worst displacement crises are in Africa and Venezuela

Africa is the home of nine of the world's ten most forgotten displacement crises, according to the 2019 ranking prepared and published this week by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which ranked Venezuela in fifth position. "The profound crises representing millions of displaced Africans are once again among the most under-funded, ignored and neglected in the world," the NGO's secretary general, Jan Egeland, said in a statement.

"They are plagued by diplomatic and political paralysis, weak humanitarian aid and little media attention," Egeland said, referring to the three criteria on which this classification is based. "Despite facing an emergency tornado, their calls for help fall on deaf ears," he said.

For the second year running, Cameroon tops this list, affected by the jihadist violence of Boko Haram in the far north, a refugee crisis from the Central African Republic in the east and the English-speaking separatist conflict in the northwest and southwest regions, with more than 700,000 internally displaced persons since 2016.

The country is followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which in 2019 added another 1.7 million people displaced by inter-communal violence and attacks on civilians in the northeast by both security forces and dozens of armed groups.

And in third place is Burkina Faso, the first of the four Sahel countries - along with neighbouring Niger (10th) and Mali (6th), plus Nigeria (8th) - to appear in this 2019 ranking; affected by the climate crisis, food insecurity and a growing jihadist threat. "More than a decade later, the conflict in northeast Nigeria between government forces and armed groups, including Boko Haram, is still far from over," says the NRC, which also highlights the severe droughts and torrential floods that the country experienced in 2019.

In Venezuela, seven years of economic freefall and a perennial political crisis since the massive demonstrations in early 2019 are behind one of the largest population displacements in Latin America in the 21st century, with about 3.7 million Venezuelans outside their country, according to the United Nations.

The other nations that appear in the ranking are Burundi (4), whose IDP crisis is caused by great political instability and economic collapse; Southern Sudan (7), with outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence and high levels of famine; and the Central African Republic (9), which has been in armed conflict since 2013.

In addition, as the NRC points out, humanitarian crises in these countries are expected to worsen throughout 2020 due to the global coronavirus pandemic, which on the African continent totals some 200,000 infections and 5,500 deaths.