Nearly four decades after the devastating droughts and famines of the early 1970s, West Africa – and the Sahel region in particular – is still struggling with hunger and high prevalence of child undernutrition.
Chronic hunger is pervasive in the region, with rates of stunting commonly reaching 30 to 40 percent of all children under fi ve. Acute undernutrition, the most severe form of undernutrition, which puts children at high risk of death, is often found in West Africa at rates that exceed internationally accepted emergency thresholds.
However, the number and coverage of nutrition interventions in West Africa have grown dramatically since the 2005 food crisis, thanks to recent developments such as ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) and community-based treatment for severe acute undernutrition, which together have revolutionised the ability to reach large numbers of children in need and allowed a remarkable scale-up of treatment and prevention of acute undernutrition in West Africa.
Despite this important progress, a lasting reduction of undernutrition in West Africa remains a far-fetched goal. Even with the dramatic increase in the coverage of nutrition interventions, hundreds of thousands of undernourished children do not receive the adequate treatment they need. Besides, the scaling up has relied to a large extent on the work of international players, particularly relief organisations and humanitarian donors, which seriously limits its sustainability and the potential for further increase in coverage. Furthermore, the fi ght against undernutrition still fails to tackle the root causes of hunger in the region. The lack of adequate policy, the scarcity of resources and the fragility of a number of states in West Africa undermine their ability to put in place adequate interventions to address these causes.
This report is the third phase of ACF’s Zero Hunger Project. It seeks to identify the relevance of a regional approach to the fi ght against hunger and to determine the potential of regional institutions in this endeavour.
A review of the six elements of success identifi ed during Phase 1 of the Zero Hunger Series – giving high political profi le to the fi ght against hunger, encouraging civil society ownership and participation, adopting a multi-sector approach, ensuring institutionalised coordination, adopting a multi-phase approach and continued fi nancial investment from government and the international community – in the West African context strongly suggests that regional institutions have a key role to play in the fi ght against hunger in West Africa.
The added values of the regional level are numerous.
They include the benefi ts of synergies and mutualisation of capacities and resources across the region in the different sectors relevant to nutrition, including, for example, the improvement of nutritional protocols, food security surveillance, food stocks, research and learning. Intervening at the regional level is also critical to address a number of problems that are regional by essence and cannot be tackled by individual countries – for example, food price volatility, which has had a dramatic impact on hunger in recent years, or constraints to cross-border trade of food and cattle.
Important developments have been taking place at the regional level in order to move forward on these issues in recent years. The most prominent and promising was the design of a Regional Programme for Food and Agriculture by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2010. The programme, created alongside institutions and a fi nancial mechanism to implement it, translates West African countries’ commitment to implement a common regional agricultural policy (ECOWAP) into a twin-track approach that will tackle both the causes and the immediate consequences of hunger in the region.