Analysis: Sahel crisis - lessons to be learnt
DAKAR, 25 October 2012 (IRIN) - The Sahel food crisis this year put an
estimated 18.7 million people at risk of hunger and 1.1 million children at
risk of severe malnutrition, prompting the largest humanitarian response the
region has ever seen and averting a large-scale disaster. But emergency
responses are rarely smooth and there is always room for improvement. IRIN
spoke to Sahel aid practitioners, analysts and donors to discuss what
hampered the response, and what needs to be done to improve response in the
future.
Early warning messages in competition
As
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94531/Analysis-Getting-early-warning-right-i
n-the-Sahel> early warning data came in, aid agencies and food security
analysts interpreted it very differently, creating some confusion and
slightly slowing down the response of donors. The debate “diverted energy
away from scale-up, which was the priority,” said Stephen Cockburn, West
Africa advocacy adviser for NGO Oxfam.
The issue lay in different means of interpreting early warning signals -
food production across the region was down by just 3 percent, but severely
high food prices (30-80 percent higher than the five-year average), lack of
jobs, border closures between Niger and Nigeria, and the Mali crisis, were
jarring enough to throw people into a crisis, and pushed agencies to call
for a US$1 billion (it later became <
http://www.unocha.org/crisis/sahel>
$1.6 billion) aid response.
“The circumstances that cause vulnerability have changed,” said Sahel expert
Peter Gubbels, with NGO
<
http://www.groundswellinternational.org/our-story/> Groundswell
International. “With food prices that high, you don’t need a drought to
spell a crisis, the drought merely stimulated these dynamics.”
Aid to pastoralists off-rhythm
Pastoralists are affected by food access issues earlier than other groups
and
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96019/MALI-Pastoralism-between-resilience-an
d-survival> need support to access animal fodder, water, vaccinations and to
destock, in March and April, not May and June.
This need is rarely reflected in early warning or response, said aid
agencies. Pastoralists’ needs are still relegated to a few specialist NGOs
rather than being addressed through national systems and as a result they
remain marginalized, said Gubbels. Further, the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), which could be a vocal advocate on their behalf, did not
clearly ring the alarm bell to donors on their needs, said NGOs.
Agriculture, health, WASH and education
Donors were swift to fund food security and nutrition efforts and their
response “went beyond the traditional nuts and bolts” this year, for
instance addressing some of the water and sanitation aspects of malnutrition
in their response. But funding to other sectors - notably agriculture, water
and sanitation and (particularly relating to the Malian displaced) education
- lagged.
“Agriculture is key to rebuilding food security in 2013,” said UN
humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel David Gressly, yet FAO had received
just one third of its $125 million funding requirement by October, and
partly as a result could only reach 53 percent of the 9.9 million people it
was targeting (as of the end of August), according to the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs ( <
http://www.unocha.org/crisis/sahel>
OCHA). Health was 18 percent funded across the nine affected countries, WASH
24 percent, and education 7 percent, according to
<
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AiHzO7bP7kUtdFFPQnc4TDdBcnRmVH
U4Z1JRT3paQkE&single=true&gid=5&output=html> OCHA.
“There is no point in saving malnourished children’s lives only to lose them
to an epidemic or to diarrhoea or malaria,” said Gressly. “We have a better
understanding of the package of interventions required. Now we need to have
interventions that cover them.”
Preparedness is also severely under-funded, with disaster risk reduction
(DDR) still making up just 4 percent of humanitarian funding. Further, it
remains a centralized activity when instead “each district authority needs a
plan… Preparedness is not at the national level, that’s DRR 101,” said
Gubbels.
Scale-up better but still slow
While early warning was for the most part good, and most actors across the
humanitarian community geared up as fast as they could, time was still lost
at the beginning, partly because aid agencies used to working in a
development context found it hard to shift into humanitarian gear, noted
Cyprien Fabre, head of European Union humanitarian funder ECHO in West
Africa. Some NGOs, including Plan International, said funding took a while
to trickle down from donors to multilateral agencies and in turn to NGOs.
However, speed picked up in early 2012, interviewees agreed.
Finding sufficient francophone technical staff remains a challenge for most
aid agencies, said the World Food Programme (WFP) Sahel coordinator Susana
Rico, and Oxfam’s Cockburn, noting they each had problems doing so, despite
using emergency staff rosters.
Moderate acute malnutrition still not sufficiently prioritized
Some three million children were estimated to be moderately acutely
malnourished in the Sahel this year, despite greater awareness of the need
to prevent moderate acute malnutrition (MAM); initiatives such as the
<
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Scaling_Up_Nutrition.pdf> SUN
movement, which aims to reduce under-nutrition; and a shift in approach from
WFP to included MAM prevention through its blanket feeding. National
governments and donors still have not prioritized MAM enough, said UNICEF
West Africa nutrition adviser Felicité Tchibindat. More help is needed
through national health and nutrition strategies, cleaner water and
sanitation and better education on nutrition and public health, say experts.
Food pipeline delays
Despite good early warning, better use of regional markets (where one third
of the food aid was sourced) and much faster procurement procedures; border
closures, insecurity, and other logistical challenges led to food pipeline
delays in some countries, notably
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95068/CHAD-Alarm-rung-late-food-running-out>
Chad and Niger.
In Chad WFP had to resort to transporting food through Sudan, which is a
long and insecure route requiring escorts. “It was a painful exercise,” said
Rico. Rations in Niger had to be cut and targeted to fewer people because of
shortages. But it is “always going to be tough sourcing food from so many
different pipelines over such a vast region,” said Rico, particularly when
constrained by insecurity in Nigeria and Mali, and the combination of rains
and poor roads. WFP staff met last week at its Rome headquarters to figure
out how to continue to improve its supply-chain.
Appeals late
There was no regional West Africa humanitarian appeal launched in 2011 or
2012, leaving fundraising to a series of national appeals, some of which
were early (Niger) but others which came as late as June, creating confusion
over how much money was needed for the crisis. UN and NGO humanitarian
leadership group the Inter-Agency Standing Committee estimated US$724
million was needed based on initial appeals, a figure that was in use until
June 2012, despite agencies predicting in January that they would need at
least $1.2 billion; and WFP alone stating it would need $808 million to
address food security. The figure has since been revised up to $1.6 billion.
On the whole, donors gave more, and more quickly, to the Sahel this year,
said OCHA head of programmes in West Africa Noel Tsekouras, but some say the
confusion eroded the confidence of smaller bilateral donors to fund in large
quantities.
Resilience must go beyond humanitarians
The
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96549/AID-POLICY-Resisting-the-mantra-of-res
ilience> resilience message is getting through to donors and some are
already trying out more flexible funding - such as the US Office for Foreign
Disaster Assistance, which enables quick scale-up of development activities
into humanitarian - but the resilience debate is relegated mainly to
humanitarian circles, not development actors.
“Development actors remain in the neo-liberal paradigm where economic growth
will help people out of poverty… but robust economic growth in the Sahel has
been coupled with increasing food insecurity and malnutrition - there is
something wrong with the development model,” said Gubbels.
Investment in agriculture - key to resilience in the Sahel - tends to focus
on high-input development in areas of the Sahel with high potential (such as
southern Mali), overlooking small-scale farmers who grow in
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95258/NIGER-CHAD-Is-sustainable-agriculture-
possible-in-the-Sahel> ecologically fragile zones. Look to Brazil for
inspiration, says Gubbels, which has two agriculture ministries: one focuses
on exports, the second on the needs of small-scale peasant farmers.
Social protection schemes for the poorest are also fairly undeveloped in the
Sahel - be they targeted cash or food distributions (from national
reserves), employment programmes, or healthcare benefits for children - and
need to be prioritized. Niger is talking about social protection, but others
need to do the same, says Gubbels.
Avoid knee-jerk market interventions
As opposed to 2010, when food markets functioned quite well, in 2011-2012
prices in some markets were 80 percent higher than the five-year average,
meaning any efforts to lower prices would have to be at an enormous scale to
have an impact, said WFP food security analyst, Jean-Martin Bauer. Thus when
national governments subsidized and made available their national cereal
stocks, it did not have a widespread impact (other than in Mauritanian
capital Nouakchott) as the amounts were too small.
“It is also a very expensive intervention,” Bauer told IRIN. “A better use
of money would be to target aid to the most vulnerable groups.”
Some governments took a knee-jerk response to restrict trade - for instance,
Burkina Faso stopped cereal trade to Niger during the lean season - but
rather than lower prices domestically, it slowed down domestic trade, as
wholesalers held back their available stocks, noted Bauer.
Trade was also restricted between Mali and its neighbours Burkina Faso and
Mauritania, partly linked to insecurity. All West African states need to
come together to set up a common agricultural market, which would enable
surpluses and deficits to better work themselves out, and could stabilize
prices across the region, Bauer said.
The scale-up of cash and cash vouchers is generally seen as a positive
development, but given the volatility and dynamism of West African food
markets (“here markets can change completely every year,” remarked Bauer), a
better understanding of when to choose food or cash is needed, he said. “The
type of analysis we need in the humanitarian sector must start to change.”
SAHEL: What went right in the crisis response?
<
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96632/SAHEL-What-went-right-in-the-crisis-re
sponse>
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Received on Thu Oct 25 2012 - 17:51:40 EDT
