Malian villagers battle advancing sands after lake dries

An inhabitant walks towards barriers fixed in the dunes to slow down the desert progression in northern Mali, May 26, 2021. Picture taken May 26, 2021. Birom Seck-ICRC/Handout via REUTERS

DAKAR (Reuters) - Since Lake Faguibine in northern Mali dried up, communities on its parched shores have had to defend their homes from encroaching sand dunes while finding new ways to scratch a living from the degraded soil.

The lake - once one of the largest in West Africa - used to be fed by annual flooding from the Niger River. But it started to disappear after catastrophic droughts in the 1970s, forcing more than 200,000 people to abandon their traditional livelihoods.