The French Committee for International Solidarity (CFSI) has announced a Call for Projects "Promotion of Family Farming in West Africa" 2021.

In order to support them, the Fondation de France and the French Committee for International Solidarity (CFSI) joined forces in 2009 to launch a program to strengthen family farming in sub-Saharan Africa, refocused since 2010 on South Africa.

This program is benefi ting from a contribution from the Fondation JM.Bruneau (under the auspices of the Fondation de France) and the Agence française de développement (AFD, French Development Agency). The Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs d’Afrique de l’Ouest (Roppa) is a member of the monitoring and orientation committee. The Jafowa program takes part to the capitalization side of the program.

Objectives

The general objective is to boost local initiatives to increase access to food through viable and sustainable family agriculture in West Africa, share their knowledge and experience on a wider scale and contribute to the documentation on the sustainability of this agricultural model. This documentation should help challenge decisionmakers to take these issues into account in public policies. 

In a context of competition with imports, this amounts to supporting “local consumption”, understood as “the local and national consumption of the products of West African family farming”.

The specific objectives are:

• through concrete, innovative action, to improve and secure the production, processing, preservation and marketing of farm produce and to ensure that poor urban and rural consumers have access to it;
• to share among local, national and international actors the knowledge acquired from concrete action under this program, and to draw comprehensive lessons;
• to produce documents and sets of arguments useful to the actors monitoring family farming issues and addressing related political issues.

Themes

The program supports projects which take into account both the following themes: 

• connecting family farming to urban and rural markets/ promoting the consumption of local products: how can local family farming supply domestic markets and feed the cities –big or medium ones– and rural settlements? How can it compete with imported products and regain a share of urban and rural markets? How to boost the consumption of local products?
• developing methods of sustainable agriculture/ sustainable food systems: is it possible to meet the challenge “Feeding the towns, now and in 2050, through family farming” by developing sustainable agriculture? How can family farming adapt to climate change?

Priority Issues

The 2021 call for projects exclusively targets specific innovations that answer one or more of these 3 questions:

• How can the marketing of local products from family farming be remunerative for peasants, peasants and other sector actors, beyond niche markets and allow the generalization of food consumption? produced and processed in the country or sub-region (that is to say by a large number of consumers from the middle and poor categories, or even very poor)?
• How can local products from peasant family agriculture have lasting access to institutional markets?
• How to make West African consumers and their organizations full players in the massive consumption of healthy and nutritious local products?

Funding Information

Two kinds of initiatives will be supported:

• short-term projects (one-year duration), with a granted amount of 10,000€ to 15,000€;
• multi-year projects (3 years maximum), with a maximum amount of 50,000€ for the whole time period (3 years) and paid in annual tranches in light of the progress of the project.

Eligibility Criteria

To non-profit legal entities:

• West African farmers' organizations (POs);
• support NGOs active in West Africa or Europe insofar as they act with local partners;
• to research and / or training organizations.

A local authority cannot be the bearer of the project but can be a main partner.

Important: the call for projects is reserved for proposals for actions in formalized partnership between a West African organization and a European organization. The supporting organization can be West African or European.

For more information, visit CFSI.