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IOM Vision
Climate change impacts nomadic herders’ routes and calendars throughout Western and Central Africa, challenging peaceful co-existence as competition over natural resources fuels violence and forced displacement. Through the roll-out and scale-up of the Transhumance Tracking Tool, early alert mechanisms, and conflict mitigation strategies, IOM will support Member States, regional organizations, and herders and farmers associations to promote free movements, peaceful transhumance, and strengthened social cohesion. IOM will also provide technical assistance to ensure that ECOWAS and ECCAS remain the regional fora to manage international transhumance in a harmonized and coordinated way.
Context Analysis
Insecurity and climate variability, in addition to demographic growth, and increased urbanization have forced shifts in the seasonal migratory routes of transhumant movements throughout West and Central Africa (Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Niger, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Senegal). In Mali, an IOM study reported that 15 per cent of herders surveyed had to change their initial itinerary, including 8 per cent to face difficulties in accessing water or pasture. Respondents also mentioned wildfires, decrease of pastoral spaces as issues affecting their mobility. In 2023, in Mauritania, an IOM study reported that 65 per cent of herders surveyed had to change their initial itinerary, and 53 per cent their timing due to the impacts of climate change. Faced with these external pressures, the past years have seen an escalation of clashes in the region between mobile transhumant and sedentary herder and farming communities over access to natural resources, necessitating collective action to pre-empt and mitigate the risk of persistent loss of life and livelihoods. The IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM)’s Transhumance Tracking Tool (TTT), through its early warning tool, recorded 4,072 alerts in 2022 in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Nigeria, including 2,929 events alerts (27% related to conflicts, 7% due to disasters such as wildfires or floods). These conflicts create protection threats in the form of violence and deliberate deprivation for the populations involved, leading to killings, gender-based violence, and denial of freedom of movement, which have a detrimental impact on individual and community mental health and wellbeing. In this context, women and girls are particularly affected regarding access to maternal healthcare services (significantly increasing the rate of maternal mortality among herders’ populations), or access to education (particularly for girls). The increased insecurity around natural resources, including around transhumance, has triggered a hardened stance among some of the coastal countries that have opted to close their borders. These policy decisions, however, have not halted the passage of transhumant herds through the coastal countries, but have instead made these movements more challenging, while unilateral decisions from countries have undermined a coherent and integrated approach toward the management of transhumant mobility in the region.
Recognizing these dynamics, multiple intra-regional bodies have convened targeted policy-level discussions to formulate cohesive regional strategies to prevent further risk of tensions within their States, including the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Economic Community for Central Africa States (ECCAS), accompanied by the largest regional herders’ network, the Réseau Billital Maroobé (RBM) representing 750,000 herders in 12 countries, who meet regularly to take stock of the latest transhumance campaigns, grouped along the three primary transhumance corridors that cross from North to South of the West and Central Africa region. As a result of these high-level consultations, two core gaps have been highlighted: the region’s lack of unified understanding of transhumant movements, including their numbers and routes, and the direct negative impact this gap has on their ability to make sound policy decisions, as much as stressing the need for localized conflict mitigation approaches to successfully address these recurrent conflicts. In addition, recently, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger shared the intention to opt out from ECOWAS without notice, which could potentially entail additional efforts in promoting free movements.
Source link : https://reliefweb.int/report/burkina-faso/west-and-central-africa-transhumance-crisis-response-plan-2024
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Publish date : 2024-02-20 03:00:00
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