LWR and Resilience in the Sahel
MALI
The cumulative effect of repeated food and humanitarian crises, coupled with more
frequent and intense climate shocks in the Sahel region of West Africa has eroded
vulnerable households’ coping mechanisms and currently places 20 MILLION PEOPLE
at risk of hunger. Throughout the region, families are struggling with recurring drought,
unstable food costs and mounting food insecurity.
With generous support from individual and institutional donors including the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, USAID’s Office of U.S.
Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (FAO), LWR is helping communities in the Sahel region build resilience
to future shocks by implementing programs that meet people’s immediate needs while
investing in long-term solutions.
SUSTAINED COMMITMENT
LWR has worked in West Africa since responding to the severe drought and food crisis that
devastated the region in the mid-1970s. LWR has worked in Niger since 1975, strengthening
agricultural cooperatives in the Tahoua and Dosso regions. LWR began working in rural
communities of Burkina Faso and Mali in 1986 to address the root causes of poverty and
lay the groundwork for greater food and nutritional security. LWR currently works in the Nord,
Centre-Est, and Est regions of Burkina Faso and in the Mopti and Ségou regions of Mali.
LWR’s West Africa Regional Office based in Burkina Faso oversees all aspects of LWR’s work
and strategy in the region, and ensures quality and efficiency of LWR programs.
BUILDING & SUSTAINING
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
LWR’s established experience and strong relationships with communities in West Africa
place LWR in a privileged position to understand local needs, coping strategies, which
allows LWR to develop effective response strategies that bolster local capacities. LWR’s
relief efforts take a long-term view and prioritize ways to enhance community recovery and
resilience even during immediate crisis response.
In collaboration with donors, local partners and communities, LWR bridges the delivery of
humanitarian assistance with sustainable development approaches to respond to drought
and food crisis in West Africa to build and sustain community resilience. LWR measurably
secures community members’ productive assets against the impact of climatic shocks
by building environmental, physical, economic, social, and human capital. LWR therefore
builds resilience by supporting community absorptive capacity, building organizations’
and systems’ transformative capacity and strengthening individuals’ adaptive capacity.
OCTO B E R 2 0 1 4
NIGER
BURKINA FASO
LWR’s resilience programs
have reached more than
1 MILLION PEOPLE in Burkina Faso,
Mali and Niger through communityled initiatives that respond to
immediate needs while supporting
long-term solutions. LWR:
•Supports absorptive capacity
by providing cash payments that
meet emergency needs for nearly
307,000 PEOPLE through cash-forwork activities that rehabilitated
more than 4,700 HECTARES of
communal land and planted nearly
884,000 TREES.
•Builds transformative capacity
by strengthening local systems and
developing the capacity of more
than twenty community-based
organizations to address the root
causes of vulnerability, reduce
the impact of future shocks, and
preserve development gains.
•Strengthens adaptive
capacity of thousands of
farmers who benefit from
increased household income
and livelihoods diversification
derived from expansion of
livestock, crop processing,
marketing and other activities.
700 Light Street | Baltimore, MD 21230 USA
800.597.5972 | programs.lwr.org
ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY
Absorptive capacity involves a reactive
response to shocks and helps individuals,
households and communities respond
quickly and effectively cope with negative
circumstances. Absorptive capacity
is most critical when other coping
capacities and safety nets have
been eroded; however, its importance
diminishes as transformative and adaptive
capacities become stronger.
In times of emergency, LWR and its local
partners support community absorptive
capacity through cash-for-work approaches
to allow community members to earn income that
contributes to improved food security by meeting immediate food
needs. These efforts simultaneously promote natural resource
conservation thereby protecting community land assets in the long
term, which is vital to sustained resilience. In addition, in times of
crisis, most subsistence farming households liquidate their seed
supply either by selling what they have or by consuming seeds for
nourishment. Seed distribution schemes intervene at a critical
moment to ensure that farming households are able to replant for
the rainy season and regain their livelihoods. LWR has reached
more than 191,000 farmers with seed distributions, alongside
holistic approaches designed to build transformative capacity of
civil society actors, such as farmers’ organizations.
TRANSFORMATIVE CAPACITY
Transformative capacity enables communities to
move beyond chronic poverty and food insecurity
through good governance and systems
strengthening. LWR is at the forefront of
organizations working to build and
sustain community resilience by
catalyzing community-based
organization (CBO) resources to build
transformative capacity.
its innovative Tripartite Rural Financing model.
Farmer associations and cooperatives that are
empowered to provide sustainable and quality
service to their members can constitute
engaged Social Change Agents on the
front line for building resilience. Through
its targeted resilience programs, LWR
has strengthened more than 20 West
African CBOs, using a gender integration
approach. These organizations now
provide safety nets to their members
during the lean season and improve
livelihoods through sustainable agriculture
efforts, that help strengthen adaptive capacity.
ADAPTIVE CAPACITY
Adaptive Capacity reflects individual and household ability to
proactively plan for risks and mitigate the impact of shocks.
Adaptive capacity represents an “end goal” of resilience efforts,
resulting in reduced humanitarian caseloads during times of
emergencies, as networks and household capital help to buoy
affected populations.
LWR improves the lives of thousands of rural farm families in
West Africa by making their participation in agricultural value
chains more profitable and by diversifying their livelihood base
to include livestock, crop processing, marketing and other
activities. LWR’s program approaches like household asset
building through agricultural production and savings promotion
strengthen adaptive capacity. By adopting Climate Smart
Agriculture methods in agricultural production, LWR
reduces marginalized rural populations’ vulnerability
to ongoing environmental degradation and the
effects of global climate change. Through
enhanced vegetable and livestock production,
LWR aims to strengthen the capacity of
vulnerable communities to secure lasting
improvements in income and food
security, which will sustain
community resilience.
In a systems approach, LWR supports
farmers’ cooperative linkages to
government and market systems.
LWR leverages access to agricultural
financing for smallholder farmers through
700
OCTO B E R 2 0 1 4
Light Street | Baltimore, MD 21230 USA
800.597.5972 | programs.lwr.org