Following the first meeting of the Management Committee of the Regional Food Security Reserve which took place on Monday, December 9, 2019 in Conakry, Guinea, ECOWAS held from December 10 to 12, 2019 still in Conakry, a regional workshop on national food security storage policies.

This workshop aimed to make an initial assessment of the state of progress of the national processes, to identify the difficulties and the solutions in order to adopt a common roadmap allowing all countries to reinforce the second line of defense (national stocks) to face food and nutrition insecurity. It was also intended to enable the adoption of the regional contingency plan, the involvement of countries in the regional support mechanism for local food storage and an initial assessment of the achievements and lessons learned from the regional strategy for food security storage.

Fruitful discussions enabled the participants to adopt the following working tools:

• the regional food and nutritional security contingency plan,
• the orientation guide for the transcription of the good practices into the procedures manuals,
• the approach of the intervention framework for supporting local food security storage and,
• the orientation note for the international conference.

They also made the following recommendations:

To all stakeholders:

• consolidate the monitoring and evaluation system at the three levels (local stocks, national stocks, regional food reserve),
• develop and implement an information, awareness and communication strategy focused on changing the behavior of actors, stakeholders and beneficiaries,
• explore existing mechanisms with countries and technical and financial partners (World Bank, AFD, etc.) that can be triggered for financing needs in the event of a crisis.

To the States:

• fully integrate local stocks and the actors that deploy them in the design of national storage strategies.