Bio Soulé, a Rural Hub programme officer, explores the obstacles that prevent the promise of cross-border trade from fully catalysing the region’s growth and development in this article for the Bridges Africa series. “If radical reforms are not carried out in these countries, the African market could become easy prey for multinationals and counterfeit traders, who have the capacity to flood it with products of all kinds,” exhorts Soulé. Read on

Laurent Bossard, director of the Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat, talks about the region's key challenges and the issue of youth employment. The interview was conducted on the sidelines of the Sahel and West Africa Week 2017 in Cotonou, Benin. Read on

The fourth high-level meeting on “Peaceful transhumance and livestock mobility in the Sahel and West African coastal countries” was held by ECOWAS from 27-29 September 2017 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Livestock ministers from across the region endorsed the funding modalities to establish the Regional Investment Programme for Livestock Development in Coastal Countries (PRIDEC), targeting the livestock sector of five coastal countries (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo). PRIDEC is designed to complement the Regional Support Project for Pastoralism in the Sahel (PRAPS). Read on

For the sixth time, the High-Level Committee on Food Security of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) took stock of the region’s food and nutrition situation. West African leaders met following the meeting of the UEMOA ministers in charge of agriculture and livestock, on 9 June in Niamey, Niger, under the chairmanship of Niger President Issoufou Mahamadou. Read on