The broad semi-arid grassland belt that runs across Africa just south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea — a fragile transition zone whose grasslands fed great empires, whose position made it the meeting point of desert and farmland, and whose rainfall now makes it a front line of drought, climate stress, and conflict.
Its name means "shore" — the shore of the Sahara, as if the desert were a sea. The Sahel is the grassland beach where that sea ends, a band of thorn and grass drawn not by any border but by a line of rain. For a thousand years that line made it rich. Today the same thin rainfall makes it one of the most precarious places on Earth.