News

Agents from the Comité Permanent Inter-Etats de Lutte contre la Sécheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS) stayed from August 08 to 12, 2016 at the SE of CORAF/WECARD to learn from the success story of the PPAAO/WAAPP. The purpose of the visit, which was part of the Projet Régional d'Appui au Pastoralisme au Sahel (PRAPS), was to learn from WAAPP's best practices in communication and monitoring-evaluation.

The interest in PRAPS is explained by PPAAO's ability to transform West African agriculture by boosting productivity by over 50%, reducing hunger and improving nutrition in 13 countries of the sub-region in just 8 years of implementation. Both PRAPS and PPAAO are financed by the World Bank.

PRAPS, which was launched in May 2015, aims to improve access to essential production means and services and to markets for over 2 million pastoralists and agropastoralists in cross-border areas and along transhumance axes in the six Sahelian countries, and improve their resilience in the face of pastoral crises. After one year of implementation, the main challenge of the PRAPS is to meet the information needs of pastoral populations, advocacy on key issues and the collection of reliable data and analyses with a view to better formulating policies and strategies linked to pastoralism, access to markets and transhumance as well as related conflicts.

The team, made up of Régina BANDE, Communications Expert, and Daouda COULIBALY, PRAPS Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, was tasked with familiarizing themselves with the management mode, successful experiences and lessons learned from the WECARD program. For 5 days, the PRAPS mission exchanged views with WAPP experts on best practices and the planning, communication, monitoring and reporting tools used by CORAF/WECARD within the WAPP framework.

For CORAF/WECARD, the technical exchange mission created a bridge between M&E and Communications experts from both institutions in terms of sharing perspectives and experiences on regional project information/knowledge management, and strategies for communicating the results of these interventions to a wider audience in the sub-region. "The frank and open technical discussions on success stories, challenges and opportunities for collaboration between the two teams of experts and other members of the Executive Secretariat are commendable.

Particular attention should therefore be paid to these kinds of exchanges between CILSS and CORAF/WECARD in different operational areas as well as in terms of capacity building for effective future collaboration and scaling up of successes and results in the sub-region", commented Dr. Youssouf Camara, Acting Director of Research and Innovation at CORAF/WECARD.