Tackling hunger in the Sahel: the challenge of resilience

 

By Technical Cooperation and Development

Food crisis, drought, chronic hunger, rising food prices: the Sahel region continues yet again to suffer from recurrent food and nutrition crises. After 2005 and 2010, the populations of the Sahel region have had to face yet another crisis in 2012, following a disastrous agricultural season in 2011. The succession of droughts leads to inevitable negative consequences for the capacities of millions of people to meet their essential food needs in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa: drought leads to a reduction in agricultural production and rising food prices on consumption markets which affects the most vulnerable households that are highly impacted by the rise in commodity prices.

 

The food crisis of 2012 in the Sahel, in Niger, Chad, Sudan as well as Mali, Mauritania and Senegal, considerably deteriorated the food security situation of some 18 million people and led to a rise in mortality for undernourished children. At the height of the crisis in mid-2012, certain areas of Mauritania, North Mali and the Sahel region in Chad were faced with “extreme” food insecurity, the level before “famine”, while many other areas were considered to be in “critical” situations.

 

A major crisis has nevertheless been avoided thanks to humanitarian actors’ mobilisation through emergency interventions. However, despite a good rainy season and a relatively good agricultural and pastoral 2012/2013 season, the negative effects of the food crisis in the Sahel in 2012 are still being felt and lead to difficult access to food and necessary nutriments for the vulnerable populations, especially during the lean period, the time between the stock depletion and the following crop.

 

A chronic and structural food crisis

 

The Sahel is facing chronic food insecurity and high malnutrition levels, even during good agricultural seasons. In Chad, even though the production levels rose by 91% since the previous year, 2.1 million people are suffering from food insecurity, including 1.5 million in the Sahel region. In the most affected regions such as the Batha region, over 50% of the population cannot cover their daily basic food needs. In Mali, 2 million people are suffering from food insecurity and the maternal and child mortality rate is one of the highest in the world (13th country out of 136).

 

The series of crises is a first factor of chronic vulnerability for households in the Sahel region. The frequent food and nutritional crises do not allow vulnerable populations to have enough time to recover and thus contribute to a progressive erosion of their livelihoods. On top of these recurrent food crises, other external shocks also contribute to the reduction of the populations’ resistance capacities. The combination of climate, sanitation, social or economic factors such as the lack of basic infrastructure or services can explain the continued food insecurity that reigns in the Sahel region.

 

Political instability in the region (political crises, conflict, violence, population displacement, refugees, etc.) also contribute to render the security and humanitarian situation more complicated and to reduce the possibility to set up long-term solutions.

 

Douentza Mali (OCHA Mali)

 

 

These structural and cyclical factors led to the worsening of the general food and nutrition situation for the populations in the region in 2012, whose livelihoods are eroded, and who have to then turn to self-destructive survival methods such as debt, selling their productive assets such as livestock, reducing their daily food intake, consuming poorer seeds or foods, etc. These irreversible methods also impede on the populations’ capacity to recover and prepare for a future crisis.

 

Emergency responses help to tackle the effect of a cyclical crisis, and at best to avoid a major catastrophe by bringing short term responses (so-called quick impact projects) to the vital needs of the populations: food distributions or coupons, money transfers, protection of their productive assets, general cash distributions, food fairs, nutrition, as well as water, hygiene and sanitation interventions. However, it is neither sustainable nor desirable to bring an immediate response, with the risk of creating a dependency towards this type of aid.

 

Insufficient emergency responses: a mitigated assessment

 

Nowadays, the necessity to address the deep, structural causes of malnutrition and food insecurity in a multi-sector and sustainable framework, and not only in terms of emergency responses, lies in the ethos but also in real commitment. Structural development programmes have to be set up to enable the most vulnerable populations to resist to shocks and crises. Fostering resilience is also a way to facilitate long-term development.

 

Programmes that link humanitarian emergency relief and development have become scarce and difficult to implement, especially because of the restrictions imposed by certain donors with regards to the financing that limits the timeframe and ambition of the programmes, and thus the possibility of a sustainable response to a crisis.

 

Nevertheless, if situations such as the food crisis in the Sahel in 2012 allow decision-makers and donors to respond to such crises, they are also an opportunity to raise the awareness of these international actors to chronic food vulnerability situations. They also encourage using sustainable response mechanisms, by putting forward efficiency, relevance and the impact of the long-term development programmes to support populations in terms of productive capacities and resilience.

Addressing the causes of chronic vulnerability in order to reinforce resilience capacities

Responding to food and nutritional crises in a sustainable way underlines the need to tackle the structural causes of malnutrition and food insecurity in the area, as well as to assist populations in terms of their capacities to to deal with chronic stress (climate hazards, hunger gaps) and to shocks (food crises, armed conflicts, refugee influx), that are inevitable for some cases and are intrinsically linked to the recurrent drought in the region.

 

The objective is to foresee and prepare for these crises beforehand, to reduce their impact for the most vulnerable communities and to foster recovery after external shocks, by limiting the effects of food crises in the short and middle term in terms of health, income, means, development opportunities and household safety.

 

The response must be multi-sector and sustainable by focusing on a response to crumbling livelihoods, community development (rehabilitating infrastructure to relieve them from isolation, setting up and ensuring access to markets, creating groups of food farmers and providing storage buildings or managing natural resources, etc) and to foster infrastructure, and individual and collective capacities in terms of water, sanitation, health, education, etc. (strengthening the health system’s human and institutional capacities, improving access to water by building wells and increasing the network as well as building adapted infrastructure, etc).

 

This integrated approach includes improving food security (agriculture support, provision of seeds, tools and agricultural inputs, improving farming techniques, irrigation, diversification of livelihoods, livestock support and recapitalisation, distribution of fodder during the pastoral lean period, animal health, improved breeding techniques, etc..), supporting households’ economic recovery after a shock (for reconstruction / recapitalisation of livelihoods while avoiding the use of destructive survival strategies), the contribution to the fight against malnutrition (prevention, screening and management of acute malnutrition, sensitisation to good nutrition and hygiene practices and distribution of hygiene kits, support to health centres to improve the quality of the management of malnutrition and access to healthcare, etc..).

 

Resilience is the ability of people to emerge stronger from a crisis situation, or at least without being weakened by a crisis. Being resilient also means to be able to analyze one’s own vulnerability and adapt to a disturbed context (post-crisis). To do so, people must be familiar with the environment and the elements that could impact the future on a daily basis (by knowledge of past crises and recurrent crises). This requires the establishment of monitoring systems for disaster risk reduction and early warning systems to foresee crises that might occur with ad hoc mechanisms, but especially in the long term.

 

Financing to tackle resilience

 

The Sahel is now in a recovery phase whose outcome will determine the ability of people to cope with shocks created by a difficult environment and climate events that regularly hit the area. Allowing the implementation of programmes to promote resilience among the most vulnerable populations also requires an adaptation from the donors in the management of funds. This is an essential requirement to break the cycle of recurring food crises in the Sahel. We have to make this choice today to contain a predictable humanitarian disaster.

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Good news from the front lines of hunger

Ertharin Cousin, Executive Director of the World Food Programme

 The past year – my first as Executive Director of the World Food Programme – has vanished in a blur.  The unfolding crisis in Syria and neighbouring countries has kept all of us in the humanitarian community busy, but for me, it is the continuing crisis in the Sahel region of West Africa that has provided a constant backbeat to my first twelve months in this job.

I chose Niger as the first country I visited as Executive Director in April last year.  At the time, the country was at the epicentre of a drought that had affected the whole Sahel region, pushing millions into the protective arms of the humanitarian community.   Hunger gnawed at the very soul of people caught in the unforgiving lean season that precedes the arrival of crops from the new harvest.

Twelve months later, when I visited Burkina Faso and Mali, millions were still facing the prospect of the next hunger season.  But this time they were better equipped to cope, even though the simmering conflict in Mali had complicated matters by forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. 

In 2012, humanitarian agencies and national governments worked together to avert a potential catastrophe.  In 2013 we are helping those same communities continue on the road to recovery as they adapt to shifts in weather patterns that have made droughts more frequent and more severe.

This is all good news.  Lives have been saved and money has been invested in building resilience, ensuring the people of the Sahel are better equipped to cope with future droughts.  But does good news get the attention it deserves?

Blink and you would have missed any news coverage of the successful early intervention that prevented disaster in the Sahel in 2012. This year, the Sahel has barely registered on the news media radar.  I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing any coverage of the healthy babies I saw in Mopti, Mali when I visited a few weeks ago.

Good humanitarian stories, it seems, are not worthy subject matter for newspaper headlines or top billing on television news channels, even when the lives of millions are at stake and tax-payers’ money is being used efficiently to provide vital assistance.

It’s not so long ago that a television report featuring harrowing images of a starving child would open the floodgates of support, compelling governments and the public to respond, donating the cash that humanitarian agencies need to stop more children going hungry.  It is a formula that has worked again and again since the first televised famine in Ethiopia in 1984, and it has been difficult for humanitarian organisations to resist.

At some point or other, we have all been complicit in identifying a “poster child” to tug on the heartstrings of the public and encourage them to reach for their wallets.  But while this may have worked in the past, it is becoming increasingly obvious that people have seen and read enough about food shortages and famine to acquire a more questioning approach to the causes of hunger and the potential solutions.

Today, potential supporters are more likely to ask why after so much work has been done, are children still starving?  And what has been achieved after all the millions of dollars have been spent, when so many people are still vulnerable to hunger?  As humanitarian agencies we must answer these questions  ourselves, but we also depend on media organisations to help us deliver the message explaining the rationale behind our response as well as to highlight success when it is deserved.

Of course we don’t work for each other, but media organisations and humanitarian agencies do depend heavily on each other’s goodwill.  We support each other as we strive to fulfil our different missions, finding ourselves accidental partners at the scene of every disaster.

The Sahel in 2012 was no Biafra, nor was it Ethiopia in 1984, or Somalia in 2011.  But human suffering – that image of a severely malnourished child - should not be the measure of whether a story merits news coverage.  Our role in the humanitarian sector must be to inspire journalists to move beyond reporting that is driven primarily by images that exemplify our collective failure.  If it takes television footage of a starving child to move a donor into action then we are acting too late.

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WFP working to bring urgently-needed food to northern Mali as food security worsens 

By the World Food Program

 

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is urgently working with partner organizations to reach families in northern Mali whose access to food has been reduced by the on-going conflict and is expected to worsen with the oncoming lean season, from April to June.

 

“I was able to go to Timbuktu last week and see how critical the humanitarian situation really is,” said Sally Haydock, WFP Country Director in Mali. “The areas around Timbuktu are unsecured and difficult to access, markets are not functioning properly, foods prices are high, fuel prices are high, and there is a lack of liquidity, which means that people are not able to buy the basic necessities.”

 

In the northern regions of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal, one household out of five faces extreme food shortages, with a significant deterioration of household food consumption in over the past weeks, according to recent analysis by the humanitarian community.

 

WFP is stepping up its efforts to transport food, both by road and river. Deliveries by road to Kidal resumed last week; with 24 trucks carrying 700 metric tons of food successfully reaching the region. 

 

Emergency school feeding is underway in 128 schools in Gao to assist 28,100 school children. Additionally, the school feeding programme has begun in Timbuktu this month in 76 schools.

 

In April, WFP is planning to provide food assistance to 145,000 people in Timbuktu; 86,700 in Gao; 34,500 in Kidal and 130,000 in Mopti, In other parts of the country WFP is planning to reach 37,000 vulnerable people in Ségou and 4,100 in Kayes.

 

Under its current emergency operation, WFP plans to support 564,000 people in Mali on a monthly basis, including about 360,000 in the North. WFP also plans to assist 163,000 Malian refugees on a monthly basis in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger.

 

WFP operations in Mali and neighbouring countries require around US$312 million. The overall shortfall is US$159 million. The operation is currently 51 per cent funded.

 

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10 Things You Need To Know About Hunger In 2013

 

By WFP

How many hungry people are there in the world and is the number going  down? What effect does hunger have on children and what can we do to help them? Here is a list of 10 facts that go some way to explaining why hunger is the single biggest solvable problem facing the world today.

1. Approximately 870  million people in the world do not eat enough to be healthy. That means that one in every eight  people on Earth goes to bed hungry each night. (Source: FAO, 2012)

2.The number of people living with chronic hunger has declined by 130 million people over the past 20 years. For developing countries, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 23.2 to 14.9 percent over the period 1990–2010 (Source: FAO, 2012)

Credit: WFP

3. Most of the progress against hunger  was achieved before 2007/08. Since then, global progress in reducing hunger has slowed and levelled off.  (Source: FAO,  2012)

4. Hunger is number one on the list of the world’s top 10 health risks. It kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. (Source: UNAIDS, 2010; WHO, 2011).

5. A third of all deaths in children under the age of five in developing countries are linked to undernutrition. (Source: IGME, 2011)

6. The first 1,000 days of a child’s life, from pregnancy through age two, are the critical window in which to tackle undernutrition. A proper diet in this period can protect children from the mental and physical stunting that can result from malnutrition. (Source: IGME, 2011)


 7.  It costs just US $0.25 per day to provide a child with all of the vitamins and nutrients he or she needs to grow up healthy. (Source: WFP, 2011)

8.  If women in rural areas had the same access to land, technology, financial services, education and markets as men, the number of hungry people could be reduced by 100-150 million. (Source: FAO, 2011)


9. By 2050, climate change and erratic weather patterns will have pushed another 24 million children into hunger. Almost half of these children will live in sub-Saharan Africa. (Source: WFP, 2009)

10. Hunger is the single biggest solvable problem facing the world today. Here are eight effective strategies for fighting hunger. Learn More

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Resilience in Simple Terms- La Résilience en Termes Simples

Agriculture et résilience : Semences et Espoir au Sahel

By FAO

www.fao.org/crisis/sahel/fr/

L'assistance de la FAO à la région du Sahel, frappée par des sécheresses durant quatre des cinq dernières années, cible les personnes vulnérables afin qu'elles passent sans encombre la période de soudure tout en leur offrant la possibilité de renforcer leur résilience face à de futures situations d'urgence. Donnons la parole à quelques bénéficiaires rencontrés en juin 2012. Ils parlent de leurs espérances suite à l'appui dont ils ont bénéficié. Car lutter pour renforcer la résilience des populations, c'est aussi, en terme simples, redonner de l'espoir, faire en sorte que les bénéficiaires regardent vers l'avenir avec confiance.

L'une des bénéficiaires de cette assistance est Ouma Moussa, mère de deux enfants. Elle fait partie des 170 femmes du village de Kirari (nord du Niger) qui ont reçu un assortiment de 50 kg de semences de légumineuses offert par la FAO en même temps que des outils agricoles basiques et des intrants.

Ouma Moussa affirme que la petite parcelle de 100m2 qu'elle cultive peut produire jusqu'à 70 kilos de pommes de terre, des choux, des laitues, des tomates et des poivrons.

Bien que les pommes de terre aient été introduites récemment au Sahel, "mes enfants les adorent", dit-elle. "Je les mets juste à bouillir."

 Prochain objectif : acheter une vache

FAQs: West Africa Sahel drought and hunger crisis

By Worldvision

Millions of children will live in a state of permanent food crisis every year because communities lack the ability to access, grow and store food. This is according to the report "Ending the Everyday Emergency" commissioned by World Vision and Save the Children.

CREDIT: WV

So what has gone wrong, what are the factors that led to this chronic food crisis in the Sahel, and what are we doing to help communities build their resilience and meet their food requirements in the long-term?


Here’s a quick guide on the crisis and how World Vision is responding.

Additionally, here’s a infographic of the difference between drought, crisis and famine.

Fighting child hunger and malnutrition in Mali and worldwide

Story and photos by Justin Douglass, World Vision Mali

October 16 was World Food Day. The story of baby Marie in Mali highlights the importance of finding long-term, sustainable solutions for hunger and child malnutrition around the world — and what we’re doing to accomplish just that.

People who saw Marie were worried.

The 18-month-old girl was too thin. She had a cough, and there was something wrong with her throat.
A community health worker encouraged Marie’s parents to take the baby girl to the health center in their region of Mali.

Baby Marie is given a peanut based nutritional suppl.

“I am concerned about what to do in the future, and concerned about the future of Marie,” says Hawa, Marie’s mother. “I think about Marie’s food and her health.”