ECOWAS in collaboration with its partners is organizing a video conference from April 28 to May 10, 2021. This high-level technical and political conference is designed as a space for sharing and reflecting on the experiences of Food Security Storage in West Africa and other regions of Africa and the world. It is also a time for policy dialogue between the region and its partners to build consensus on the need to increase West Africa’s capacity to address the looming food, nutrition and pastoral crises.

This conference follows 5 years of implementation of the regional storage strategy adopted in 2012, with the support of the European Union . This strategy deploys a regional storage system based on three lines of defense to produce a coordinated response to cyclical crises: decentralized local stocks, national stocks and the Regional Food Security Reserve created in 2013, which consists of a physical stock (1/3) and a financial reserve (2/3). The achievements, challenges and important lessons learned in the three lines of defense led ECOWAS authorities, in consultation with their regional and international partners, to organize this conference.

It aims to: (i) share the progress made, the achievements and the difficulties encountered; (ii) outline the prospects for the next 10 years in a context of major and rapid changes; (iii) lay the foundations for an enlarged partnership around the regional food reserve system, capable of responding effectively to the food, nutritional and pastoral crises that affect the living conditions of the populations while slowing down the attainment of the ECOWAP objectives and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 1 and SDG 2)