Harnessing Local Expertise: A Blueprint for Food Security in Mali and Beyond

Implementing development programs in the field amidst recurring conflict, unpredictable logistical challenges, and seasonal weather complications requires much more than just comprehensive strategic planning. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) Pillar 3 project found that success hinges on building meaningful partnerships with local actors and intentionally investing in their capacity strengthening.

Over the past 39 years, FEWS NET has provided leadership and critical early warning analyses on food security for USAID and other humanitarian agencies worldwide. The project, which has been implemented by Chemonics since 2000, uses a livelihoods-based approach to examine how shocks—whether climatic, market-based, or conflict-related—impact local livelihood systems and households’ access to essential resources necessary for survival and prosperity. FEWS NET forecasts food insecurity and informs decisions on humanitarian planning and responses in the world’s most food-insecure countries. FEWS NET’s livelihoods-based approach to early warning and food security analysis is rooted in Household Economy Analysis (HEA), which is a framework that helps understand how households of different wealth levels manage their environment and assets and how they interact with the broader economy. HEA baselines are the starting point to FEWS NET’s contextual and forecasting analyses.

Since November 2022, FEWS NET has partnered with USAID to develop and update HEA livelihood baselines for six countries, including conducting fieldwork in Mali to update their baseline profiles. This posed a particular challenge as the team had to conduct rigorous fieldwork in 16 livelihood zones across the 1.24 million km2 of Malian territory amid the peak rainy season and in volatile areas within the brief span of 6 months. During this time, security threats in the Northern regions, such as Mopti, Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu, coupled with geographical inaccessibility, posed extra challenges to the already arduous endeavor.

The key to overcoming these challenges and effectively updating Mali’s livelihood baselines was to integrate a localization approach through two key elements: a) recognizing local expertise and partnering with local stakeholders, and b) investing in strengthening local capacity. Given Chemonics’ long-standing role with FEWS NET, it has had the opportunity to build strong, reciprocal relationships with local organizations. This foundation supported the project in effectively updating Mali’s livelihood baselines, showcasing the power of locally led development while delivering impactful short-term results and laying the groundwork for lasting sustainability in regional livelihood expertise.

Recognizing Local Expertise and Partnering with Local Stakeholders

The FEWS NET team established a strategic partnership with Mali’s Early Warning System (SAP), a government agency that leads national food security analyses and response plans in collaboration with other government ministries and international organizations. The project developed a strategy that identified and capitalized on the HEA knowledge of SAP agents while investing in enhancing their technical skills. Through this partnership, SAP agents co-lead the national data collection efforts, integrating their staff into the fieldwork teams to serve as team leaders and regularly participate in planning sessions.

The partnership proved successful due to the alignment of objectives with SAP’s, ensuring that both parties had complementary goals. Integrating SAP’s nuanced contextual insights into the planning and implementation phases allowed the team to identify SAP’s strengths and expertise early on, which was key to navigating on-the-ground realities such as ethnic sensitivities and security risks.

In Mali, more than ten ethnic groups speak more than 14 languages. Given this culturally rich and complex national landscape, centering the perspectives of local stakeholders and engaging them throughout project design, implementation, and evaluation ensured that fieldwork activities were responsive and appropriate to the local context. For example, SAP agents recruited and integrated data collectors from diverse Malian communities and ethnic groups which streamlined accessibility and safety and promoted local ownership of the data collection process.

On the other hand, the project regularly faced security and accessibility challenges when mobilizing teams for data collection in Mopti, Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu, which are areas that have been affected by conflict. Leveraging the partnership with SAP, which had local agents in the north, allowed the project to tap into their contextual understanding of the study areas and leverage their community connections to safely and effectively complete data collection.

Investing in Strengthening Local Capacities for Impactful Outcomes

The project provided several training courses in the HEA framework to SAP professionals aiming to strengthen their experience in livelihoods research and analysis. Integrating SAP professionals into fieldwork provided them with hands-on experience in developing the knowledge base information and tools used in their early warning and food security analyses. By the end of FEWS NET’s project in Mali, 60 Malian SAP team members were trained in collecting the HEA data. Of this group, 17 team leaders received additional training on supervising field teams, ensuring data accuracy, and conducting higher-level analyses, which positioned them as leaders in Mali’s early warning system and the broader food security community.

By effectively partnering with local actors and enhancing their capacities through training and practical experience, the FEWS NET 7 Pillar 3 project strengthened the food security monitoring and analysis infrastructure. This approach ensured that the locally driven baselines were seamlessly integrated into national-level analyses and forecasting. Additionally, the cadre of HEA practitioners in Mali have the technical capacity to effectively lead HEA monitoring and data collection efforts with minimal to no external assistances, ensuring the project’s long-term sustainability. Key areas of success include:

1. Driving Efficiency. By integrating community experts as co-leads of data collection, the project gained a deeper first-hand knowledge of the local context, generating buy-in and acceptance from villages and fostering community-based participation and trust that ensured local voices were heard and included in the decision-making processes. These resulted in efficiently collecting more accurate and relevant data, thereby saving time and resources.

2. Enhancing local systems. The project expanded the pool of skilled HEA practitioners for data collection and analysis that will influence Mali’s food security and early warning systems. Mali now has over 60 local professionals trained in conducting livelihoods assessments through the HEA framework, which is immensely valuable during both the regular seasonal monitoring efforts and national analyses.

3. Building and leveraging regional expertise. The investments in strengthening the local leadership pipeline have had a regional impact leading to the Malian team leads who were trained in 2023 now actively coordinating data collection efforts for the FEWS NET Pillar 3 project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They’ve partnered with the National Program for Food Security and Nutrition in Agriculture to discuss the value of the HEA framework for strengthening existing early warning systems in DRC, as well as how the baselines can be used for monitoring key food security indicators and used in national-level food security analyses.

To build on the successes achieved, future efforts should prioritize and intentionally invest in local capacity-building while fostering long-term partnerships with community leaders. This approach will ensure that interventions are sustainable, relevant, and responsive to community needs and insights. As we look ahead, it is imperative to continue integrating local actors throughout the FEWS NET Pillar 3 project’s lifecycle to build on these successes for lasting development outcomes. Through FEWS NET and other ongoing strategic partnerships, local actors will continue to play an essential role in sustaining these efforts and strengthening future food security initiatives in Mali and beyond.

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