APA – Lagos (Nigeria) The President of the ECOWAS Commission, Mr. Jean-Claude Kassi Brou, and the Director of the French Development Agency (AFD) in Nigeria, Xavier Muron, on Tuesday in Abuja signed a grant agreement for a complementary funding of the Interim Phase of the support to the Food Security Storage System in West Africa.
This new funding follows a pilot phase funded by the European Union for €56 million (of which €31.9 million delegated to AFD) to support the ECOWAS Regional Food Security Storage Strategy. Adopted in 2012, this strategy combines local stocks, national stocks and a Regional Food Security Reserve (RFSR) to ensure regional solidarity in the event of a major food crisis in the region.
According to the statement by the ECOWAS Commission, the 8 million euro and 3-year AFD support to ECOWAS aims to increase the region’s readiness to manage food, nutrition and pastoral crises with a variety of causes. Increasing crises management capacity involves consolidating, in the short term, the achievements of the implementation of the first phase of the RFSR and building a multilateral partnership around the regional food security storage system in the mid and long terms.
“ECOWAS welcomes AFD’s new financial support to the regional solidarity instrument, the relevance and effectiveness of which were demonstrated during the first phase. The new funding will notably enable the Regional Food Security Reserve to increase its readiness t fully play its role as the first line of defence in the event of a shock affecting people ability to feed themselves. The new phase will also be an opportunity to build a multi-stakeholder funding partnership to ensure the sustainability of our food security storage system,” the President of the ECOWAS Commission said.
The ECOWAS Commission, through its Department of Agriculture, Environment and Water Resources, is responsible for the implementation of the new project. The project activities will be implemented in all fifteen (15) ECOWAS Member States, as well as in two (2) CILSS Member States (Chad and Mauritania) that were involved in the implementation of the pilot phase.
“AFD’s partnership with the ECOWAS Commission since 2011 in supporting the implementation of the Regional Agricultural Policy, ECOWAP, is a living model. We have no doubt that this new support will contribute to the sustainability of the food security storage system in West Africa and mobilize other development partners to further strengthen resilience to the various shocks affecting food security in the region,” the Director of AFD Nigeria explained.
GIK/APA