Since 2012, West Africa has adopted a Regional Food Security Storage Strategy based on four complementary lines of defense: (i) community stocks managed by groups or cooperative organizations, (ii) national food security stocks managed or co-managed by States, (iii) the Regional Food Security Reserve implemented by ECOWAS through its Regional Agency for Agriculture and Food and (iv) the international Aid if necessary.

The first line of defense generally relies on local organizations capable of anticipating and quickly responding to shocks the populations are victim of, pending the mobilization of other lines of defense in the event of a serious crisis (National crisis response systems and Regional Food Security Reserve, Support from the international humanitarian community).

In this perspective, ECOWAS brings together for the fourth time, from 19 to 24 February 2020 in Niamey, the members of the Drafting Group on the production of regional guidelines for food security community stocks in West Africa.

The general objective of this meeting is to finalize the documents that will build the regional guidelines documents to be used in the framework of a training Curriculum on proximity Storage. The Niamey discussions should specifically make it possible to examine and amend the draft versions of the:

• Memento of Proximity Storage in West Africa,
• Regional Intervention Framework for Proximity Storage,
• Charter on the Operation of Proximity Storage,
• Learner's Booklets (or training modules).

The various documents to be examined will be subject to a presentation at a regional validation workshop in the coming months.