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

To support them, the Fondation de France and the French Committee for International Solidarity (CFSI) joined forces in 2009 to launch a programme to strengthen family farming in sub-Saharan Africa, which has been running since 2010 in South Africa.

This programme is benefiting 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 steering committee. The Jafowa programme participates in the capitalisation side of the programme.

Objectives

The overall aim is to boost local initiatives to increase access to food through viable and sustainable family farming in West Africa, to share their knowledge and experiences on a wider scale and to contribute to documentation on the sustainability of this agricultural model. This documentation should help challenge decision-makers to take these issues into account in public policies.

In a context of competition with imports, this is equivalent to supporting "local consumption", understood as "local and national consumption of West African family farming products".

The specific objectives are:

• through concrete and innovative actions, to improve and guarantee the production, processing, preservation and commercialisation of agricultural products and ensure that poor urban and rural consumers have access to them;
• share the knowledge gained from concrete actions under this programme among local, national and international actors, and draw comprehensive lessons;
• to produce documents and sets of arguments useful to actors monitoring family farming issues and addressing related policy issues.

emus

The programme supports projects that take into account the following themes:

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

Priority issues

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

• How can the marketing of local products from family farming pay off for peasants, farmers and other sectoral players, as well as niche markets, and allow for the generalisation of food consumption? produced and processed in the country or sub-region (i.e. by a large number of consumers in the middle and poor, or even very poor, categories)?
• How can local products from peasant family farming gain lasting access to institutional markets?
• How can West African consumers and their organisations become full members of the mass consumption of healthy and nutritious local products?

Financing Information

Two types of initiatives will be supported:

• short-term projects (lasting one year), with an amount awarded of between €10,000 and €15,000;
• multi-year projects (maximum 3 years), with a maximum value of €50,000 for the entire period (3 years) and paid in annual instalments in the light of the project's progress.

Eligibility criteria

For non-profit legal entities:

• West African Farmers' Organisations (WFOs);
• support NGOs active in West Africa or Europe insofar as they work with local partners;
• for research and/or training organisations.

A local authority cannot be the project carrier, but it can be a main partner.

Important: the call is reserved for proposals for actions in a formal partnership between a West African organisation and a European organisation. The supporting organisation can be from West Africa or Europe.

For more information, visit https://www.cfsi.asso.fr/thematique/appel-a-projets-promotion-lagriculture-familiale-afrique-louest-fondation-france-et-cfsi