The Lives and Livelihoods Fund and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) have signed $99m in finance with the Governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal for the Sahel Sustainable Pastoralism Development Project, which aims to support regional food security and improve the livelihoods of one million people in the Sahel region of West Africa.
The Sahel Sustainable Pastoralism Development project is the first cross-border development project for the Lives and Livelihoods Fund, which has committed over $600m to rural infrastructure, agriculture productivity and disease eradication projects over the past year in North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The project will establish a regional framework to help provide smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the Sahel with better access to markets, with a focus on small ruminant and livestock production. It will increase the value of rural household farms, make nutrient-rich foods more affordable, and support animal health and production.
It is estimated that about 50 million people rely on pastoralism for a major part of their livelihood in Sub-Saharan Africa, with around half of them located in the Sahel and the Saharan fringes, and 70 percent classified as poor by the World Bank.
Maher Al Hadrawi, Assistant Supervisor General for Operations and Programs at King Salman Relief and Humanitarian Aid Center and Chair of the Lives and Livelihoods Fund for its first year of operations, stated that financing for the project is made possible by the Fund’s innovative concessional finance framework, which blends ordinary finance from the IDB with LLF donor grants.
