Thirty-five million Africans driven from homes by war and climate disasters – report

The Rusayo IDP camp on the outskirts of Goma in the DRC, home to tens of thousands of people fleeing fighting in the north of the country. Photograph: Alexis Huguet/AFP/Getty Images

Wars and climate disasters have driven a threefold increase in the number of internally displaced people in Africa over the past 15 years, according to new data.

There are now 35 million people internally displaced on the continent, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), compared with 11.6 million in 2009, when African governments signed a landmark deal legally binding them to tackle the causes of displacement.