The top third begins on the Mediterranean coastlines of the North African Arabic-speaking countries. The coastal plains quickly become the Sahara, the world’s largest dry desert, which is almost as big as the USA. Directly below the Sahara is the Sahel region, a semi-arid, rock-strewn, sandy strip of land measuring more than 3,000 miles at its widest points and stretching from Gambia on the Atlantic coast through Niger, Chad and right across to Eritrea on the Red Sea. The word Sahel comes from the Arabic sahil, which means coast, and is how the people living in the region think of it – as the
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