Food security and livelihoods – from recovery to resilience

The African Sahel, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, has seen a number of recurring droughts in modern history, most recently in 2010, and again in 2012, where failed crops, high food prices, a lack of pasture, and regional conflict, left up to 18 million people experiencing both cyclic and chronic food insecurity. Over the last three years, utilising three separate Department for International Development (DFID) funding agreements, Action Contre la Faim (ACF) have responded with a mixture of emergency response and capacity/resilience building programmes across five of the most affected countries: Niger, Chad, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Activities include unconditional cash distributions, cash for work programmes, food, agricultural and animal inputs, and livestock distributions, WASH interventions, health garden programmes aimed at diversifying nutritional intake, and Warrantage and Cereal Bank programmes. The third tranche of DFID funding was aimed particularly at moving communities from recovery to resilience, and is the subject of this evaluation. The evaluation was carried out by two independent consultants with the aim of assessing the success of the intervention while extracting lessons learnt that could support future operations in the region, and possibly elsewhere. Success was measured utilising a mixture of information gathering techniques based on the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) evaluation criteria.