While progress in Africa can be seen across the board, every day-migrants are dying in the Mediterranean. The continent is in fact a powder keg. The powder is demographics. And the detonator is unemployment. What is worrying for the continent is even more dramatic for the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants, where insecurity is spreading and which may act as a detonator for West Africa with a population of 700 million in 25 years.

The mass unemployment of young people far more than jihadist propaganda, is the primary explanation for the dramatic collapse of Afghanistan. Despite major differences in geography and culture, there are huge similarities between the Sahel and Afghanistan, increasing insecurity, drug trafficking, and the spread of radical Islam being the most worrisome.

There are striking similarities between Sahel and Afghanistan. Both regions have a demographic jump ahead, stagnating agriculture, large unemployment, acute ethnic and religious faultlines, lack of law and order, regional instability, drug trafficking and the spread of radical Islam. The role of the international community in both regions needs serious reassessment.

Unfortunately the same recipes that failed in Afghanistan are again being rolled out in the Sahel. Without a radical change in the international community's behaviour, we will soon be confronted with, first, a 'Sahelistan' and then an 'Africanistan,' an African Afghanistan, but five- or ten-times worse.

Table of contents;

Part I: Sub-Saharan Africa: The End of Euphoria

1. The new threats to Africa’s stability and growth
2. Programmed demographic explosion in the Sahel?
3. Marginalization and underemployment in rural Africa
4. Will Africa skip the industrial development stage?

Part II: Fragile States in the Eye of the Storm
5. What causes fragility in certain states?
6. Weak institutions weaken fragile states
7. The ignored fragility of Côte d’Ivoire and its descent into hell: 1980 to 2012

Part III: Lessons the Sahel Can Draw from Afghanistan
8. Is the Sahel in the process of turning into a new Afghanistan?
9. Afghanistan—Lesson one: Security cannot be entrusted for long to foreign forces
10. Afghanistan—Lesson two: Aid agencies cannot be left to do as they please
11. Afghanistan—Lesson three: In fragile states, the priority is to build modern, efficient, sovereign institutions

Part IV: What Is to Be Done?
12. Key security lessons for the Sahel drawn from the West’s failure in Afghanistan
13. Other key lessons for the Sahel and donors drawn from the West’s failure in Afghanistan

Conclusion
Epilogue: How the world has changed a lot in some ways and hardly at all in others