Seven Austrian NGOs – HOPE’87, the Red Cross, Light for the World, Horizont3000, Jugend Eine Welt and ICEP under the leadership of CARITAS Austria – have joined forces to develop a programme covering interventions in Burkina Faso and Senegal. It focused on strengthening the resilience of vulnerable people in West Africa in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, with actions having started in November 2020. The programme will last for a period of 3 years.

This project followed a call for proposals from the Austrian Development Agency for consortia, allocating 3 million euros for actions in West African countries that have suffered from the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The collaboration emphasised the complementarity of each actor, the specific expertise of others in the different sectors of WASH, health, livelihoods, food security and training skills to best meet the needs of the people. Particular attention is paid to the humanitarian-development nexus, which combines humanitarian interventions with medium and long-term actions.

The general objective of the project was to help mitigate the social and economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (within the framework of SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8) in Senegal, with the specific aim to contribute to the resilience of vulnerable groups affected by the consequences of COVID-19 and related emergencies or shocks in the department of Kolda.

Therefore, HOPE’87-Senegal developed activities addressing the economic impact of the pandemic on the population of the Department of Kolda. This was combined with an intervention on awareness and protection mechanisms to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus in the villages. As part of this, 5,000 households in the communities of Mampatim, Medina Chérif, Dialambéré and Bagadadji were trained in improved agricultural methods to compensate for the losses they envisaged during the country’s containment phases. In this context, HOPE’87 helped develop and strengthen the creation and management of agricultural areas and provided technical support to farmers in order to reduce their production costs with the help of the provision of agricultural inputs. An additional focus was put on mothers and young children and their specific nutritional needs, so that a total of 11,000 people benefitted from the action.