The Global Trust Fund for Food Security and Food Safety, managed by FAO and supported by a special contribution of the Italian Government’s Directorate-General for Italian Development Cooperation (DGCS), has committed to fund seven national food security projects in Western Africa, including Mali, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and The Gambia.

The projects, with a total budget of USD 21 million, is implemented through a common strategy of food security through commercialization of agriculture. The main objective of the five-year intervention is to significantly contribute to food security by turning agriculture into a more modern, competitive and commercially dynamic sector. Capacity building within Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs) for profitable economic activities including production, processing and marketing will sustain long-term impact.



The overall strategy aims at:

• Promoting Food Security and supporting specific policies to introduce sustainable production/processing/marketing systems;
• Supporting food sovereignty and biodiversity valorization and the development of local and regional markets;
• Applying communication methods and tools to ensure that farmer based organizations/associations are the focus of the proposed interventions, with particular attention to gender issues.

These projects complement the Italian contribution to the Global Trust Fund supported regional projects in Eastern (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) and Southern (Malawi and Zambia) Africa and build further strategies to achieve sustainable food security through improved farmer organizations, production and value addition. The projects are nationally implemented with FAO technical backstopping through the National Programmes for Food Security and built on achievements and lessons learned from pilot activities of the Special Programmes for Food Security. International and local NGOs and private sector are involved in various aspects of implementation.

The national projects are supported by a sub-regional coordinator based in Dakar, with support of a facilitator in Freetown under a project entitled “Inter-country Coordination for West Africa Food Security Projects”. This project helps to ensure inter-country collaboration and coherence within a common strategic framework including sharing expertise and successful practices. The coordination unit also addresses regional issues, such as access to regional and international markets, food quality and safety, cross-border trade, and harmonization of policies and institutions to support competitiveness and modernization.