IASC Weekly (GVA): Learning the Lessons? - Assessing the response to the 2012 Sahel food crisis
Geneva
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Meeting Documents
1. Learning the Lessons? - Assessing the response to the 2012 Sahel food crisis
Ms Elise Ford, Oxfam Humanitarian Campaign Manager for West Africa and author of the Report "Learning the Lessons? Assessing the response to the 2012 food crisis in the Sahel to build resilience for the future" will discuss the major findings of the report. Oxfam, with contributions from Save the Children and ACF, has just published a paper on the Sahel food crisis. The paper looks primarily at how the international community responded to the crisis and what can be done to build on the "resilience" momentum.
Background
In 2012, the Sahel region of West and Central Africa was once again hit by a severe food crisis, affecting over 18 million people at its peak. At the start of 2012, when the crisis began to unfold, many governments, donors and aid agencies were determined not to make the same mistakes again. This report considers how well they collectively performed, and the lessons that must be learned to improve future responses. It is important for the humanitarian community that, while continuing to address the enormous humanitarian and recovery needs in the region, to learn lessons from the 2012 response and to develop a new model that will allow better prevention and management of future crises. The growing momentum around the concept of resilience offers considerable potential to achieve this, but only if all actors work together to turn rhetoric into action that brings lasting improvements for the poorest communities across the Sahel.
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