Niger sits at a crossroads. Geographically, it occupies the heart of the Sahel, the semi-arid transition belt running from Senegal to the Red Sea, with roughly 80 per cent of its territory consumed by the Sahara Desert to the north and east. Politically, it has become the latest casualty of West Africa's coup epidemic, with the July 2023 military takeover that ousted President Mohamed Bazoum completing a grim trifecta alongside Mali (2021) and Burkina Faso (2022). Ecologically, its southern fringe harbours one of West Africa's most important transboundary wildlife zones. And for pangolin trafficking, it has a specific, troubling role: its ancient trans-Saharan trading city of Agadez serves as a major consolidation and transit hub for contraband moving from sub-Saharan Africa to North African ports and European markets.
These four dimensions, geography, politics, ecology, and trafficking infrastructure, interact to create one of the most challenging conservation environments on the continent. Understanding pangolin conservation in Niger requires mapping all four and recognising how deeply they intersect.
Niger's Pangolin Species and Range
Two pangolin species are documented in Niger: the Temminck's Ground Pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) and the White-bellied Pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis). Both are restricted to the country's southernmost zones, where rainfall is sufficient to sustain the woodland-savannah habitats that support the termite and ant colonies these species depend on. The extreme southwest of Niger, bordering Benin and Burkina Faso in the Dosso and Tillaberi regions, represents the core of whatever pangolin population exists in the country.
This southern strip also encompasses W National Park (Parc National du W), a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996 and the keystone of the W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) transboundary ecosystem. The W designation comes from the distinctive W-shaped bend of the Niger River that forms part of the park's boundary. W National Park in Niger covers approximately 2,200 square kilometres and shares borders with the W portions managed by Benin (4,000 km2) and what was until recently managed by Burkina Faso (2,174 km2, now heavily compromised by security collapse). The broader WAP complex extends to include the Pendjari Biosphere Reserve in Benin (managed by African Parks since 2017), creating a contiguous protected area network approaching 17,000 square kilometres.
Camera trap surveys conducted in the WAP complex before the security deterioration of the 2020s documented Temminck's Ground Pangolin in both the W and Pendjari components. White-bellied Pangolin presence in Niger's W section is considered likely given the species' distribution in southern Benin and Burkina Faso but remains insufficiently surveyed.
The 2023 Coup and Its Conservation Consequences
On July 26, 2023, members of the Presidential Guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum and announced the formation of a junta under General Abdourahamane Tchiani. The coup triggered an immediate international response: ECOWAS threatened military intervention (ultimately not carried out), the United States suspended security assistance and much of its development aid, France accelerated its military withdrawal, and the European Union froze budget support. These responses directly impacted conservation funding.
USAID's Feed the Future and Resilience programmes in Niger had included natural resource management components supporting community land stewardship and reduced pressure on wildlife habitats in the south. These were suspended immediately after the coup. The French Development Agency (AFD), which had co-funded the WAP regional programme including W-Niger management support, paused disbursements pending political normalisation. The World Bank's conservation-adjacent agricultural programmes also entered a hold period.
The Direction de la Faune, Chasse et Pêche (DFCP), Niger's wildlife management authority, found itself stripped of a significant portion of its operating budget at precisely the moment when armed group activity was intensifying in the Tillaberi region that overlaps with W National Park's buffer zone. Ranger salaries fell into arrears, vehicles needed for patrol went unmaintained, and communication equipment failed without funds for replacement. The result was a progressive collapse in effective management of the park's Niger section.
Conflict in the Liptako-Gourma Triangle
The security crisis in Niger predates the 2023 coup and has been building since the early 2010s. The Tillaberi region in the southwest, which borders Mali and includes portions of W National Park's buffer zone, is part of the tri-border Liptako-Gourma area that has become the epicentre of Sahelian jihadist activity. Groups including JNIM (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, affiliated with al-Qaeda) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) operate extensively in this zone.
The practical consequence for conservation is that significant portions of W National Park are either inaccessible to rangers or actively patrolled by armed groups who treat the park's resources as available for exploitation. Poachers operating under the cover of jihadist territory-holding face minimal risk of interception. Commercial hunters from Nigeria, who had historically raided the WAP complex for bushmeat during periods of weak enforcement, reportedly increased activity in the Niger and Burkina Faso sections of the ecosystem as French-supported security infrastructure withdrew.
The Diffa region in southeastern Niger, bordering Nigeria's Lake Chad basin, presents a separate security crisis driven by Boko Haram and its splinter faction ISWAP. While Diffa is not primary pangolin habitat, it is a staging area for livestock and wildlife trafficking flows between Nigeria's northeast and Niger's Agadez corridor, connecting the Lake Chad basin trafficking network to the trans-Saharan routes.
Agadez: The Trans-Saharan Smuggling Hub
Agadez is among the oldest cities in sub-Saharan Africa, a former caravan capital of the Tuareg people and historically a waypoint on the trans-Saharan trade routes linking West African gold and salt to North African and Mediterranean markets. In the 21st century, Agadez acquired a darker contemporary significance: the EU identified it as the primary transit hub for irregular migration from West and Central Africa to Libya and the Mediterranean, and international law enforcement subsequently documented that the same smuggling infrastructure that moves people also handles drugs, weapons, and wildlife products.
For pangolin trafficking, the Agadez route works as follows. Pangolins and scales are collected across Nigeria's middle belt and Niger's south, or transit from as far away as DRC and Cameroon through Nigeria. They are consolidated in Kano or Zinder and moved to Agadez. From Agadez, convoys move north through the Tenere Desert to the Algerian border crossing at In Guezzam or the Libyan border at Dirkou/Madama, from where they connect to Libyan coastal cities (Sebha, Misrata, Tripoli) and either enter European markets or are shipped across the Mediterranean to Turkey and Southeast Asia.
The scale of Agadez's role in wildlife trafficking is difficult to quantify precisely because it is embedded within a broader informal economy of unprecedented volume. UNODC estimates tens of thousands of migrants per month were transiting Agadez at the route's peak. Wildlife products represent a high-value, compact portion of the smuggling cargo that is economically rational to include in convoys primarily organised for other contraband. The same vehicle that moves 30 migrants and 50 kilograms of cannabis northward through the Sahara can carry a few kilograms of pangolin scales with minimal additional risk.
The W-Arly-Pendjari: Niger's Conservation Anchor
Despite the security crisis, W National Park remains Niger's most important conservation asset and the primary formal protection for whatever pangolin populations persist in the country. The park's UNESCO World Heritage status provides a degree of international profile and political accountability that purely national protected areas lack, though it has not prevented degradation of enforcement capacity.
The contrast within the WAP complex is instructive. The Beninese Pendjari component, managed by African Parks since 2017 under a 10-year renewable concession, has maintained active management, ranger deployment, and monitoring throughout the Sahelian crisis. Funding secured from philanthropy and international conservation donors insulates Pendjari management from the political disruptions affecting government budgets in Benin and neighbouring countries. Lion, elephant, and hippopotamus populations in Pendjari have stabilised under African Parks management, and camera trap monitoring continues to document pangolin presence.
Niger's W section, lacking equivalent private conservation management, has fared considerably worse. The IUCN-supported WAP management coordination unit, based in Cotonou (Benin), has attempted to maintain a monitoring function across the complex, but operational capacity in W-Niger is minimal. African Parks has expressed interest in expanding its WAP engagement to include W-Niger and W-Burkina Faso, but political negotiations with military governments are complex and no agreement has been finalised as of mid-2026.
Climate Stress and Pangolin Habitat
Niger consistently ranks among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. The Sahara is advancing southward at measurable rates, shrinking the Sahelian belt that supports Niger's wildlife. The Niger River, which forms part of W National Park's boundary, has experienced reduced flows and altered flood dynamics linked to upstream land use changes and reduced Sahelian rainfall. Reduced river flooding affects the gallery forest and floodplain woodland habitats that support White-bellied Pangolins and other forest-dependent species in the WAP complex.
Agricultural expansion driven by population growth (Niger has one of the world's highest fertility rates, with a population projected to exceed 50 million by 2050) is encroaching on buffer zones around W National Park from the south and east. The conversion of woodland to millet and sorghum fields fragments pangolin home ranges and brings animals into closer contact with farming communities where snare-based hunting pressure is highest.
What Recovery Requires
A pathway to improved pangolin conservation in Niger runs through several interconnected requirements. Political stabilisation enabling international re-engagement is a prerequisite for restoring the funding flows that sustained conservation programmes before the coup. Within that political window, priority interventions include: securing the W-Niger section under a professional management agreement, ideally extending the African Parks WAP mandate to include the Niger component; rebuilding DFCP capacity with ranger salaries, vehicles, and equipment; and integrating wildlife law enforcement into the security sector reform agenda that donors are likely to prioritise in any post-junta normalisation process.
On the trafficking side, the Agadez corridor demands a specific intervention: training and equipping Niger's customs and gendarmerie forces to identify wildlife products within the broader contraband inspection mandate they exercise on trans-Saharan convoys. CITES-supported customs training, species identification materials, and intelligence sharing with Nigerian, Algerian, and Libyan authorities would help close the gap that allows pangolin shipments to move through Agadez with near-impunity.
Niger's pangolins are survivors. They have persisted through drought cycles, agricultural expansion, conflict, and trafficking pressure across decades of political instability. What they cannot endure indefinitely is the complete collapse of the enforcement systems and protected area management that represent the only barrier between them and commercial extinction. Rebuilding those systems, even partially, even imperfectly, is the urgent task for conservation partners with an eye on West Africa's Sahel.