A new airborne instrumental payload has been designed for an ultralight aircraft to determine the vertical profile of aerosol optical properties. It is based on Lidar Aérosols UltraViolet Aéroporté (LAUVA), a compact backscattering lidar system emitting at the wavelength of 355 nm. We operated this airborne configuration in the Sahel from the city of Niamey (Niger) during the first campaign of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) in January-February 2006, when aerosols from both soil dust and savannah fires cause large visibility reductions. We take advantage of the lidar capability of pointing in different directions for retrieving the vertical profile of the aerosol backscatter to extinction ratio (BER). A synergy with a scatterometer (880 nm) and a ground-based sunphotometer allows us to further determine the vertical profile of Angström exponent (a). We identify three types of aerosol layers up to about 5 km below the free troposphere, dominated by biomass burning (BB) particles, mineral dust (D) particles, and a mixing between BB and D particles, respectively, associated with BER (a) values close to 0.008 sr(-1) (1.5), 0.025 sr(-1) (0), and 0.015 sr(-1) (0.4-1).