Visualizing Senegal’s Humanitarian Context: Lessons from the Last Decade and the Way Forward

This paper briefly reviews Senegal’s humanitarian context in the last decade, opportunities, challenges, lessons learnt, strategic directions and the way forward for partners involved in building resilience.??

As a country in the Sahel, Senegal has been gripped by complex humanitarian crises in the last decade due to drought, flooding, and climatic variability affecting over half of the 15 million populations. Poor harvest, recurrent hunger and malnutrition, high food prices and low resilience are some of the challenges linked to the complexity of the crises. The government developed a 20 years strategic policy framework on “Plan for Emerging Senegal” that aims to get the country onto the road of development by 2035. The policy framework is committed to bringing about gender equality and equity; access to basic and primary education; multi-sector nutrition strategy; food security and access to diverse and healthy food; social protection through safety nets and private sector initiatives for agricultural and resilience building among other things.

Non-profit organizations including UN agencies such as FAO and WFP have been running their programs in Senegal that are monitored and informed by country strategic plans; annual reports; periodic evaluation/impact assessment and lessons learnt. Of the 17 globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), non-profit organizations in the humanitarian sectors target SDG 1 (No Hunger), SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDG 4 (gender equality), SDG 5 (clean water and sanitation), SDG 13 (climate change mitigation), and SDG 17 (partnership).

In the last decade, Senegal has shown some improvement in its performance to reduce poverty due to its strategic alignment and collaborated performance of the government, UN agencies, NGOs, the private sector and the communities. A good example is WFP’s partnership with the government and local stakeholders to influence policies and institutional arrangements that reduced stunting from 27% to 18.8% in the last decade (Brar, et al.[1] 2020; Kampman, et al.[2] 2017).?School feeding has been to some extent changed from imported nutrients to locally produced food items such as poultry/eggs, vegetables and fruits that add value to the market systems development and resilience.?People living below the poverty line have been reduced from 50.7% a decade ago to 39%. Senegal’s literacy rate is boosted from 42.5% in 2013 to 51.9% in 2017 (World Bank, 2020) due to influences in socio-economic and political systems as well as innovations around school feeding programs.??

Fig. 1 Average under 5 mortality rate in Senegal (Source: Summarized report of UNICEF (2018)

While it is better compared to the Sub-Saharan Africa, gender disparities are significant in Senegal. According to UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index (GII), Senegal ranks 125 out of 162 countries. The patriarchal society dictates that women manage household duties while men focus on earning money. In rural areas, women represent majority of the agricultural labor force (about 70 percent)[3]. Only 15.3 percent of the household heads are women[4] - marginalized in local economies and often lack decision-making power at household, farm, and community levels. A recent study reported that adolescent girls are sexually abused two-times more in Kolda[5] compared to other provinces. Furthermore, polygamy, forced marriage, and genital mutilation?are still pervasive. Discriminatory norms adversely affect women’s and girls’ health, education, income and access to adequate food and nutrition.

?Rural Resilience Initiative (R4) run by WFP, Oxfam and many other organizations, emphasizing community-level participatory planning and resilience-building has emerged as one of the approaches to enhance food assistance for assets. The R4 initiative is aligned with integration of local development as well as government’s national adaptation plan for climate shocks and stresses. Such initiatives strengthen the adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations and reinforce national capacities for emergency preparedness and response, including monitoring of food and nutrition security. Such approach helps communities affected by seasonal food and nutrition insecurity to receive food or cash assistance and benefit from complementary activities thereby building long-term resilience.

Although progresses have been witnessed, the food and nutrition insecurity are still recurrent and strongly linked to poverty, unsustainable food production, recurrent climate shocks, high food prices, dependence on local markets and low household and community resilience. Furthermore, the situation is aggravated by the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19 outbreak that hugely affected the global socio-economic systems. The global report of UNDP (2020) highlighted increment of poverty by 40-60 million people, escalation of domestic violence on women, reduction of school attendance by 68%, and drop of social protection by 55%. Additionally, 60% of informal jobs are lost, remittances reduced by 20%, revenues from visitors and jobs related to tourism totally lost and global trade will potentially decline by 27%.

The pandemic has significantly compromised the glimpse of hope in Senegal infecting and affecting the health and socio-economic outlook of the communities respectively. The humanitarian response is shifted to addressing the challenges associated with the disease in addition to the already outlined strategic outcomes of government, private sector, UN and non-profit organizations. Government and its partners are now developing new operational plan to provide guidance on transport, storage, targeting and distribution of goods and services that address the impacts of COVID-19.??

Scenario analysis of FAO (Oct 2020) underlined that Senegal is surrounded by countries of food insecurity “hotspots” such as Mali and Mauritania that could heighten conflict and escalation of refugees. The situation is aggravated by the “socio-economic consequences to contain the spread of COVID – 19” challenging the resilience building initiatives. Moving forward, all parters need to strengthen their work to achieve SDGs 1, 2, 4, 5, 13 and 17 as well as in addressing the challenges associated with COVID – 19 pandemic to bring all Senegalese on the development train. Traditional funding agencies, initiatives in the South-South cooperation and the private sector donors need to work hand-in-hand to triumph the global SDGs in the coming years. Emergency responses that target COVID – 19 as well as other emerging pandemics should also be on the pipeline moving forward.

[1] Brar, S. et al. 2020, Drivers of stunting reduction in Senegal: a country case study, Am. J. Clin. Nutr.; 112 (Suppl): 860S–874S.

[2] Kampman, et al. 2017, How Senegal created an enabling environment for nutrition: A story of

Change, Global food security, 13: 57-65.

[3] RGPHAE report (ANSD, 2013)

[4] FAO and ECOWAS (Senegal, 2018)?: Profil national genre des secteurs de l’agriculture et du développement rural.

[5] Anwar, y. et al. (2020)?Assessing gender differences in emotional, physical, and sexual violence against adolescents living in the districts of Pikine and Kolda, Senegal, child abuse and neglect, 102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104387