A report for the IASC Principles
The Sahel region includes some of the poorest countries in the world, with minimal basic services and very low nutrition, health and livelihoods indicators. The population of the Sahel has traditionally been very resilient, with strong social solidarity, in which communities under stress support each other to share limited resources. This resilience has been eroded over the last 20 years by a series of phenomena: rapid demographic growth putting pressure on stressed resources, inequitable economic development, rapid urbanization, uneven governance, etc. People have become increasingly dependent on remittances and, as the region imports a lot of its food needs, on markets that are subject to rapid fluctuations. The decreasing time between shocks is making recovery more difficult and these crises are pushing more people into poverty, contributing to increasing malnutrition and the erosion of coping mechanisms.
This note is the result of a mission in the Sahel undertaken to provide the IASC Principals meeting of 13 December 2012 with lessons learned and forward looking recommendations on building more resilience in the region (TOR attached as annex 1). The team visited Senegal, Chad, Niger and Mauritania from November 1st to 17th 2012, and the mission itinerary and list of people met are attached as annex 2 and 3. It builds on some evaluation and learning exercises such as the UNICEF Real Time Independent Assessment in Sahel, the FAO lesson learning workshop in Addis-Ababa3 and numerous NGO studies.