“Ultimately, the women of the Sahel will be instrumental in putting the region on a path to stability,” the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Sahel, Romano Prodi, told the Conference on Women’s Leadership in Sahel in Brussels on 9 April.

“I want to tap into the potential of women to accelerate progress in the Sahel. The discussions that took place today and the recommendations by the participants will help us in seeking sustainable solutions for the Sahel.”

The participating group included some 40 women from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, as well as representatives from the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

They presented their recommendations to Mr. Prodi, as well as the Acting Head of UN Women Lakshmi Puri, and Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission.

Today’s discussions helped shape a common vision on how to empower women to help political stability and economic prosperity in the Sahel ahead of the High-Level Donor’s Conference on Development in Mali to be held on 15 May in Brussels, speakers said.

“It is well established that for peace to be sustainable – a peace that extends beyond the simple act of signing a peace agreement – it needs to be rooted in justice and inclusion,” said Acting Head of UN Women and Assistant Secretary-General Lakshmi Puri.

“There can be no comprehensive strategy to address the sustained and systemic crisis without women’s full participation,” Ms. Puri reiterated, noting that numerous UN resolutions and the international community have stressed this idea.

“We hope this Conference will usher in concrete efforts to increase the participation of women and gender experts in conflict resolution and in the transition to peace, economic recovery, democracy and stability,” she added.

The Sahel region – which stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea – suffers from extreme poverty, with human development levels among the lowest in the world, porous borders that present security challenges, as well as significant human rights problems.

The recommendations of the Conference include ensuring that at least 30 per cent of participants in decision-making and politics are women, including through the adoption of pro-active measures.

Participants also agreed on the need for national governments, regional organizations and the international community to support an increased participation of women in conflict-resolution initiatives and to strengthen their entrepreneurial skills and access to services, according to UN Women. The participants also called for sustained and predictable financing for initiatives dedicated to gender equality.

“This year, some nine million people across the Sahel will still require food assistance from WFP, through emergency food assistance, rural development, nutrition and education activities,” said Ertharin Cousin, WFP Executive Director.

Cousin was the host of a high-level event in Rome bringing together leaders of humanitarian agencies, government representatives from affected countries and major donors to review the effectiveness of the assistance provided to the region.

Last year the international community helped to avert a humanitarian catastrophe by providing $1.2 billion in assistance to around 10 million people across eight countries in the Sahel, noted a news release issued by WFP.

“However, millions of people in the region are still affected by drought, with close to 1.5 million children under the age of five at risk of severe acute malnutrition,” said the agency.

Cousin emphasized that boosting food security and building resilience lies at the heart of the collective efforts to change the pattern of recurring drought and continue on the path towards a better future.

WFP says that crop prospects are currently encouraging, but there is a high risk of future shocks, due to increased rates of poverty and undernourishment, extreme weather, environmental degradation, low investment in agriculture, high prices and vulnerability to market volatility.

Also, the conflict in Mali has triggered widespread displacement in the region, uprooting half a million people and placing pressure on communities still recovering from drought.

The western part of the Sahel region, which stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and parts of Sudan, Cameroon and Nigeria, is facing a swathe of problems, which are not only political but also involve security, humanitarian resilience and human rights.

Last September, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi as his Special Envoy for the Sahel and tasked him with shaping and mobilizing an effective UN and international response to the multiple crises facing the region.

“The focus of the United Nations strategy for the Sahel is on the people of the region, to help them address the root causes of instability, with special emphasis on marginalized communities,” said Mr. Prodi. “My role is to bring the best minds and all the resources possible around key long-term development issues that critically affect the peoples of the region.”

Today’s event also featured a short documentary film, “The Human Chain,” which chronicles the humanitarian response to last year’s Sahel crisis, illustrates various forms of assistance – including cash and vouchers, special nutrition programmes to prevent severe cases of malnutrition as well as support for smallholder farmers to improve their self-reliance in the face of difficult climatic and economic conditions.

A spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP), Elisabeth Byrs, told reporters in Geneva that the UN agency had already reached more than one million people in the Sahelian country despite its volatile political and security situation.

Byrs’ announcement comes against the backdrop of a high-level meeting held today in Mali’s capital, Bamako, where an African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and United Nations Meeting of the Support and Follow-up Group on Mali discussed how to address the security, political and humanitarian problems facing the country since the start of the year, when fighting between Government forces and Tuareg rebels broke out in the country’s north.

Since then, radical Islamists have seized control of the north, where they have imposed an extremist version of Muslim Sharia law as well as restrictions that target women in particular.

The instability and insecurity resulting from renewed clashes, as well as the proliferation of armed groups in the region, drought and political instability in the wake of a military coup d’état in March, have led over 250,000 Malians to flee to neighbouring countries, with 174,000 Malians estimated to be internally displaced.

Byrs reported that preliminary findings from a joint WFP/Early Warning System survey conducted this month confirmed the deterioration of living conditions in the north of the country. She added that overall, 4.6 million people across Mali remained at risk of food insecurity and 560,000 children under the age of five were at risk of acute malnutrition.

In addition to its free targeted food distribution centres, which she said had helped more than 250,000 people in the month of October, the WFP spokesperson further noted that the agency was implementing long-term empowerment strategies through capacity building initiatives, such as reforestation, rehabilitation, prevention of soil erosion, building classrooms and roads and well as creating accessible water sources.

Byrs also said that WFP was preparing its Emergency School Feeding programme, targeting 290 schools in southern Mali, where children will receive a WFP ration of ‘Supercereal’ – a highly nutritious product which will enable them to concentrate on class work.

Also on Friday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced that a joint mission with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) completed a two-day visit to Mali.

The aim of the visit was also to better understand the current humanitarian situation in Mali, assess the assistance already provided, and discuss the challenges faced by the Government and humanitarian actors.

“The visit of the joint mission has allowed us to present the complexity of the humanitarian situation to the international community,” said the UN Humanitarian Coordinator and Resident Coordinator for Mali, Aurélien Agbénonci, in a joint news release.

“It is urgent to strengthen humanitarian assistance to save lives while respecting human dignity and preventing an increase of humanitarian needs in countries neighbouring Mali,” he added. “Interventions can no longer wait because humanitarian needs are becoming bigger day by day while available resources are still insufficient.”

During its visit, the joint mission’s participants discussed the humanitarian crisis in the country with the Government and the diplomatic corps, as well as the humanitarian community and civil society organizations. They also visited a nutritional centre in the district of Kangaba, in the region of Koulikoro in the country’s west.

In the joint press release, OCHA and OIC noted that more than five million people are in need of immediate humanitarian assistance in Mali, representing about one third of the estimated population of 15.8 million.

A spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP), Elisabeth Byrs, told reporters in Geneva that the UN agency already assisted six million people in the Sahel during the month of July – but cautioned that humanitarian needs still remained “huge” ahead of the October harvest.

“The increasing frequency of the droughts has had an eroding effect on the Sahel countries’ ability to cope and the local populations have barely had enough time to recover from the 2010 crisis and rebuild their assets before the situation degenerated again,” Byrs said.

Africa’s Sahel region, which stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and parts of Sudan, Cameroon and Nigeria, has been regularly afflicted by food insecurity – UN humanitarian agencies estimate that there are currently some 18 million people facing food insecurity in the region, due to a combination of drought, volatile food prices, as well as political instability in some areas.

Byrs noted that many families were left with nothing to eat and had found their only sustenance in soups made from wild plants so bitter that animals often neglected to eat them.

“To make them edible, peasants boil the plants repeatedly so as to get rid of the bitter taste,” Byrs noted, adding that some households in the Sahel had been without food reserves for some seventh months.

Along with its partners, WFP is scaling up its activities to reach some 10 million people in the region with food assistance over the coming months, despite a $304 million shortfall in the $888 million sought in funding for its response activities in the Sahel.