The European Union’s Special Representative to the Sahel is urging coastal West African States including Ghana to tackle what he described as very “significant security challenges” in the sub-region.

Details of the 2024 Global Terrorism Index released by Institute for Economics & Peace and aimed at measuring the impact of terrorism reports that over half of all terrorist deaths now occur in the Central Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, which has replaced the Middle East as the epicenter of terrorism.

The country most affected by terrorism was Burkina Faso, where deaths rose by 68% while attacks fell by 17%. Pointing out this situation and other growing trends of military overthrows of democratically elected governments, João Gomes Cravinho, told JoyNews’ Blessed Sogah in an exclusive interview that “nobody is protected, nobody is safe from the circles of the waves of insecurity that we see in the region”.

He added that these security challenges are closely related to other dynamics, lack of development dynamics and the emerging global threats of misinformation and disinformation. “So many factors converge and there are no simple” , João Gomes Cravinho said.

President Mahama said Ghana is leading efforts to create a broader coalition beyond the Accra Initiative, which currently excludes the three Sahelian nations. “Continuous dialogue and engagement are needed to resolve some of the mutual challenges we face,” President Mahama said.

“The Accra Initiative was set up as a platform for joint fights against violent extremism in the West African sub-region. Unfortunately, the AES states are not participating in it, and so what I’ve been engaged with is seeking a new platform that can bring them on board.”

Commenting on whether this local initiative will be pivotal in tackling the crisis, the European Union’s Special Representative to the Sahel held the belief that Ghana has an important role to play in bringing together the Alliance of Sahelien States (AES) following their departure from the sub-regional bloc ECOWAS at the end of 2023.

João Cravinho further noted that these countries, ever since their exit, have been in a situation where they lack a common institutional grounding with which to tackle the growing problems of violent extremism.

"Many of these problems cannot be solved within national borders; they are trans-border problems, and they are problems that relate to more than one problem. For that to happen, you need to have better dialogue….international cooperation, and President Mahama has a very significant role to play”

Ghana has a long-held record as one of the most stable democratic countries in coastal West Africa.

However, when asked about development in the Sahel threatening the peace and stability of the likes of Ghana, the European Union’s Special Representative to the Sahel pointed out that, as far as the EU is concerned, Ghana remains a very important partner for the stability of this wide region.

“I’m looking forward to going to Ghana in the first week of December to meet a wider range of Ghanaian interlocutors and to work with them with the view to seeing what we can do more and better together to bring stability to this region”.