Terrorism is claiming an average of about 44 lives every day in West Africa and the Sahel, with the growing scale and intensity of violent extremist attacks, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Minister for Foreign Affairs, has revealed.

He warned that the frequency and spread of attacks continued to threaten peace, stability and development across the region.

Mr Ablakwa said the region now accounted for between 47 and 59 per cent of all recorded global terrorist incidents.

The Minister described the trend as a stark reminder that the epicentre of global terrorism had shifted from the Middle East to West Africa and the Sahel, calling for renewed regional cooperation and collective action to confront the rising insecurity.

He said over the past 15 years, terrorist attacks in the region had increased by more than 1,200 per cent, with the death toll rising by nearly 3,000 per cent, a situation he said could no longer be ignored.

The Foreign Affairs Minister was addressing delegates at the opening of a High-Level Consultative Conference on Regional Cooperation and Security in Accra, which will culminate in a Summit of Heads of State and Government.

The conference brought together intelligence chiefs and senior security officials from across the subregion to discuss terrorism, violent extremism, transnational organised crime, and maritime insecurity in the Gulf of Guinea.

Delegations from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Mali, as well as representatives of the African Union Commission and development partners, are participating in the conference.

Mr Ablakwa said the human cost of terrorism was no longer abstract statistics but a daily reality confronting families and communities across the region.

He cited a recent attack in Niger that prevented that country’s delegation from travelling to Accra for the meeting, describing it as a sobering example of how insecurity continues to disrupt lives, governance, and regional cooperation.

“The challenges we face are not confined to a single nation,” he said, noting that extremism in the Sahel, piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, trafficking across porous borders and organised crime were interconnected threats that transcended national boundaries.

He stressed that no country could stand alone against such dangers, and that the absence of a clearly agreed regional vehicle to confront these trans-border threats was “totally unacceptable”.

Mr Ablakwa said intelligence must be broadened beyond kinetic and military threats to include the economic, social and governance pressures that extremists exploit, such as climate stress, food insecurity, youth unemployment and weak border communities.

He urged intelligence chiefs to see intelligence not only as a security tool but also as a compass for socio-economic development.

He called for a new culture of trust and actionable intelligence-sharing, warning that fragmentation and suspicion had undermined collective efforts in the past.

He proposed four guiding principles for renewed cooperation: trust, resource mobilisation from within the continent, integration of security, development, and governance, and foresight through credible, regionally owned early-warning systems.

Mr Muntaka Mohammed-Mubarak, Minister for the Interior, said the scale of lives lost to terrorism reflected the urgency for a coordinated regional action.

He said violent extremist groups in the Sahel had intensified their operations, launching coordinated attacks on military installations, civilian centres and critical infrastructure, leading to widespread displacement and humanitarian crises.

Mr Mohammed-Mubarak said the Sahel now accounted for more than half of global terrorism-related deaths, a development he described as a clear warning that the crisis was no longer localised, but posed serious spillover risks to coastal West African states, including Ghana.

He said the growing lethality of attacks, including the use of drones, improvised explosive devices and complex ambushes, had increased the human toll and deepened instability.

The Interior Minister said terrorism thrived where poverty, unemployment, climate-induced resource scarcity and weak governance converged, creating fertile ground for recruitment and radicalisation.

He said security responses must therefore be embedded in a comprehensive, regionally owned framework in which development and security are treated as mutually reinforcing.

Mr Mohammed-Mubarak said Ghana continued to confront transnational crimes such as illegal migration, smuggling, drug trafficking and cybercrime, and while intelligence-led collaboration had yielded some arrests, the scale of the threat demanded stronger regional coordination.

COP Osman Abdul-Razak, National Security Coordinator, said the conference was convened in recognition that the threats claiming thousands of lives across the region were transnational in nature and required intelligence-led responses that cut across national and institutional boundaries.

The National Security Coordinator, who chaired the conference, noted that the meeting would review the security situation in the sub-region, assess governance and socio-economic drivers of insecurity, examine existing cooperation frameworks and contribute to a communiqué to be issued at the end of the Heads of State Summit.

He said strict confidentiality and structured working arrangements had been adopted to allow frank and productive exchanges among participating intelligence chiefs.