top 10 African Countries with the Highest Number of Internal Displaced People as of 31 December 2016

Ethiopia has experienced a steady stream of internal displacement over the years, but the number of people affected rose sharply in 2016 and the first half of 2017. This was due to natural disasters and conflict, according to a newly report released by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre entitled Africa Report on Internal Displacement.

Ethiopia is now one of the countries on the continent with the most number of internally displaced people. This shows that internal displacement is becoming a major problem in the country.

The drivers of displacement have historically been a combination of slow and sudden-onset disasters, competition for resources, and ethnic tensions—factors which often overlap and mutually reinforce each other. A combination of floods, droughts, and violence in Ethiopia led to the displacement of close to 412,000 people during 2016 and the first half of 2017. At the end of 2017, about 14,000 families who had fled severe flooding in 2016 were thought to still be displaced. Since ethnic based conflict continued throughout 2017, the number of displaced people is expected to rise dramatically.

Currently, close to a million people remain internally displaced due to the violence that erupted between ethnics groups in the state of Oromia and Ethiopia’s Somali Region.

Rank	Country	Number of Displaced People
1	Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)	1,052,000
2	Ethiopia	644,000
3	Nigeria	579,000
4	South Sudan	281,000
5	Sudan	220,000
6	Niger	212,000
7	Somalia	183,000
8	Libya	156,000
9	Cameroon	83,000
10	Central Africa Republic (CAR)	54,000