West Africa is faced with the combined challenges of civil insecurity, heightened by armed and inter-community conflicts and climate change to which the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) has been added since 27 February 2020. This pandemic cuts across all sectors and disrupts production, warehousing, marketing, processing, and distribution systems of agricultural and food products.

Considering these crises, the region must retaliate in a more coordinated manner to save the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable people, without losing sight of the ECOWAP key intervention areas. More than ever, resilience strengthening is the hinge point between emergency responses, crisis recovery and the building of the foundations of a robust and sustainable agricultural and food system capable of meeting medium and long-term challenges: youth employment, adaptation to climate change and the deployment of agroecology, a food and nutritional security that eliminates hunger and malnutrition, effective national and regional institutions, family farming structured by more productive and competitive professional organizations that are well articulated to markets, adequate financing tools, etc.

With this in view, the ECOWAS and UEMOA Commissions in collaboration with their technical and financial partners shall readjust their mechanisms to better handle the response to food and nutrition crises in the region. The good connection of the regional monitoring system with the three-level system of the Regional food security storage strategy and the field projects of social safety nets, will enable the monitoring of the living conditions of the most vulnerable households and provide appropriate responses to the structural crises that have been affecting the region for the past decades.