Current Challenges

Like many communities in Chad and across the Sahel, the Tandou Valley faces multiple interconnected challenges, including a degraded ecological landscape, hunger, poverty, armed conflict, and increased threats accelerated by climate change.

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Current Challenges

Environment

Chad ranks last out of 182 countries in the 2020 Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative index on climate change vulnerability.

Inhabitants of the Sahel have historically relied on farming and livestock for their livelihoods, but shifting rainfall patterns and intensifying droughts are making subsistence increasingly difficult and limiting agricultural progress. An increasingly common occurrence, the “lean season,” takes place during years of intense heat and drought, typically between June and August. It coincides with the hottest period of the year, when food insecurity rises sharply and communities often require humanitarian assistance to meet basic food and nutrition needs.

Overgrazing, soil erosion, the cutting of vegetation for firewood, and biodiversity loss further degrade surrounding ecosystems, compounding the region’s vulnerability.

Economics

Food insecurity and environmental degradation are tightly linked in fragile ecosystems such as Chad. Together, they drive economic insecurity for individuals and households, with 42% of the population living below the poverty line. A limited and unstable revenue base leaves local, regional, and national governments with few resources to support those in economic distress.

Weak infrastructure for food production, processing, storage, distribution, and sale constrains market growth and broader economic development. The remoteness and resource scarcity of rural areas further hinder efforts to ensure that households receive the basic provisions and support they need to survive.

Geopolitics

More than 1 million refugees currently reside in Chad, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing refugee populations in Africa. The intense conflict in Sudan, just east of Chad, has forced hundreds of thousands to leave their homes, alongside other refugees from Central Africa and Nigeria.

These refugees fled conflict only to find themselves in communities already in economic and environmental distress, with few income opportunities or basic human services, resulting in 40% of these refugees suffering from poor food consumption. Additionally, efforts to confront the Sudanese refugee crisis in the east have left refugees around Lake Chad and in other parts of the country with little to no aid.

Society

As natural resources have dwindled and demographic pressures have increased in Chad, income opportunities have decreased and internal strife has intensified, with minimal social services available to deal with the effects. In 2023, approximately 2.1 million people were severely food insecure during the increasingly frequent “lean seasons” (usually occurring between June and August), marking the fourth consecutive year of severe food insecurity.

More than 31% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition, in part due to the poor health of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. In 2020/21, Chad ranked next to last globally for gender inequality. Both education and health services are severely limited, making societal transformation very difficult.