Community resilience building across five Sahel countries is turning one of Africa’s most food-insecure regions into a model for lasting, locally driven recovery.
Community resilience building across five Sahel countries is delivering results that were once considered out of reach. Since 2018, the World Food Programme (WFP) and its partners have run the Sahel Integrated Resilience Programme across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. The program has reached more than 4 million people across more than 3,200 villages and is steadily reducing dependence on emergency food aid.
The Sahel is a semi-arid strip of land running across Africa between the Sahara Desert and greener tropical zones to the south. The region faces overlapping crises: widespread hunger, land degraded by overuse and drought, political instability, and a changing climate that makes farming and herding increasingly unpredictable. Despite these pressures, the program shows that the right mix of investment and community ownership can significantly shift outcomes.
The numbers are striking. In Niger, 80% of program villages no longer needed emergency food assistance during the lean season, the difficult months between harvests when food stocks run low. This removed more than half a million people from the emergency aid system each year and reduced assistance costs by $54 million. Gains held even after direct household payments ended.
Land is at the heart of this work. Since 2018, the program has restored more than 290,000 hectares of degraded land, equivalent to roughly 406,000 soccer pitches. Farmers use traditional techniques such as half-moons (crescent-shaped pits that catch and hold rainwater) and zaï pits (small planting holes filled with organic material) to rebuild soil fertility. Satellite data collected with NASA confirmed their impact: on 18 sites in southern Niger, vegetation was nearly 50% higher after the intervention and 25% higher than in comparable nearby areas without support.
Food security improvements followed. In Burkina Faso, cereal harvests by participating households grew from around 730 kilograms to over 2,100 kilograms between 2019 and 2022. In Chad, the share of households eating iron-rich foods rose from 50% in 2018 to nearly 90% in 2022. One in four targeted households became food secure across the five countries over the 2018 to 2023 period.
School meals have played an outsized role in community resilience building across five Sahel countries. In Niger, schools with WFP-supported meal programs saw dropout rates fall by 7%. In Mali, 95% of households whose children received school meals planned to allow both boys and girls to complete school, compared to just 55% among households without access to meals. Girls who also received attendance-based cash grants passed their exams at a 63% rate, compared to 50% for classmates without grants.
The land restoration work also contributes to climate protection. Each rehabilitated hectare sequesters an estimated 6 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, measured in partnership with the AGRHYMET Regional Center, a specialized institution of the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS). That makes the program both a climate-action tool and a food-security investment.
Social change has accompanied the practical results. Women’s participation in livelihood activities increased household incomes and gave women greater decision-making power within their families and communities. Young people found reasons to stay in their villages, reducing outward migration. Studies conducted with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) found that collaborative planning reduced tensions between farmers and herders, displaced people and host communities, and across ethnic and religious divides.
The program is backed by a wide coalition including governments, UN agencies, and regional bodies such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The WFP also helped establish the Sahel University Network for Resilience (REUNIR), bringing together six universities across five countries to train the next generation of experts in food systems and land management. This institutional investment ensures that community resilience building across five Sahel countries can be sustained and scaled well beyond the current program cycle.
Similar land-based approaches are gaining traction elsewhere. Programs using food forests and permaculture to restore degraded landscapes reflect the same core insight: when communities take ownership of their land, the land gives back.
Community resilience building across five Sahel countries is not a short-term fix. It is a framework for lasting recovery, built from the ground up by the people who know the land best. The evidence shows that food insecurity at this scale is a problem with solutions.
