Supporting Effective Regional Integration in the Sahel and West Africa

The goal of the project is to help achieve improved sustainable food and nutrition security as well as improved peace security and prosperity for West African women and men. The project provides direct financial support to the Secretariat of the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) to carry out its mandate effectively which aims to advance priority issues such as gender climate change and job creation across West Africa. As a high-level decision-making forum on regional development planning with a focus on regional food security governance SWAC acts as a vehicle for facilitating coherent planning and policy making across the Sahel and building civil society regional and West African organization’s networks and their engagement with regional leaders. The project aims to support SWAC in contributing multi-stakeholder dialogue solutions and tools that take into account the complementarities between local national and regional levels. These in turn informs the development of policies and plans that support food and nutrition security stability and green economic growth in the Sahel and West African Region The project is expected to support systems and programming that reduce food and nutritional insecurity for 1.2 million Sahelian people affected by food insecurity.

The expected results of this project include: 1) improved regional governance on food security and humanitarian crises in West Africa; 2) strengthened regional economic cooperation and integration in West Africa; and 3) deepened strategic linkages with West African regional economic communities in line with Canada’s trade development and diplomatic objectives.