Anticipatory actions for food security in the Sahel: FAO, CILSS and their partners share their experiences

FAO and the CILSS Aghrymet Regional Centre in collaboration with their regional and national partners organized from 28 to 30 September 2022, a regional meeting for sharing experiences and partnerships to strengthen actions for anticipating food crises in West Africa and the Sahel.

The overall objective of the workshop was to foster mutual understanding and cohesion between key actors and initiatives and to provide a better understanding of the information and tools needed for the implementation of anticipatory action systems, ensuring a coordinated collective effort to make these initiatives effective and sustainable.

During the three days of work, the 60 participants agreed on anticipatory action at the West African and Sahel level with a focus on the regional review of anticipatory action approaches, key lessons learned and strategies of each actor in order to identify good practices from national experiences in recent years. These exchanges helped to put organizations on the same wavelength as regards the importance of anticipatory action in the face of food crises, while also ensuring closer collaboration between humanitarian partners, regional organizations and governments, in order to contextualize these new initiatives in the regional food crisis management policy.

The work also identified the main challenges and possible solutions to a common approach to food crisis anticipation, with a particular focus on what constitutes anticipatory action in relation to different typologies of hazards, and how to better exploit information and early warning systems available at regional and national levels.

The three-day discussions also noted that the effective use of early warning information and the establishment of a mechanism to rapidly trigger funding allows for action and intervention well in advance of a standard humanitarian response. Timely agriculture and food security interventions have the potential to reduce the number of people requiring food assistance after the hazard has occurred or peaked. Projects implemented to date linking early warning to early action have shown that acting early before food crises has multiple proven benefits, such as reducing food insecurity and malnutrition, protecting livelihoods, contributing to building resilience to future shocks, as well as empowering targeted communities.

Evidence of the effectiveness of anticipatory action is leading to a growing recognition of the importance of integrating anticipation into the emergency and food security governance model. In recent years, different actors have launched a variety of initiatives to develop and implement anticipatory action programmes and projects in West Africa.