Deadline: 25-Apr-23
The Fondation de France and the Comité Français pour la Solidarité Internationale (CSFI) joined forces in 2009 to launch a new program to reinforce family farming in West Africa: Promoting family farming in West Africa (Pafao) program.
It benefits from a contribution from the JM.Bruneau Foundation (housed at the Fondation de France) and the French Development Agency (AFD). The Joint Action for West-Africa (Jafowa) program participates in the capitalization component of the program. The Network of Peasant Organizations and Producers of West Africa (Roppa) is a member of the Orientation and Monitoring Committee. The program supports or has supported more than 300 initiatives since 2009 on the basis of an annual “general” call for projects and 5 “Coup de Pouce” calls.
Objectives
- The general objective of the Pafao program is to:
- promote local initiatives to strengthen access to healthy and quality food, produced by viable and sustainable West African family agriculture and processed in the country or in the sub-region, while ensuring an equitable distribution of value added to value chains (this is the present call for projects) ;
- capitalize (produce knowledge) to draw useful lessons beyond projects, for organizations and for advocates. The challenge is to contribute to documentation of the sustainability of this agricultural and food model likely to challenge decision-makers to take these issues into account in public policies;
- support the construction of scaling up strategies so that successful initiatives do not remain marginal but occupy more economic space.
- The specific objectives are:
- through concrete, innovative action, to improve and secure the production, processing, preservation and marketing of farm produce and to ensure that poor urban consumers have access to it;
- to share among local, national and international actors the knowledge acquired from concrete action under this program, and to draw comprehensive lessons,
- produce documents and arguments useful to the actors who monitor policies and challenge policy-makers.
Themes
the program supports projects which take into account both the following themes:
- Strengthening the consumption of local quality products from sustainable family farming in rural and urban markets – mass markets and institutional / promoting the consumption of local products
- Developing methods of sustainable agriculture
Funding Information
- Two kinds of initiatives will be supported:
- short-term projects (one-year duration), with a granted amount of 10,000 € to 18,000 €.
- multi-year projects (3 years maximum), with a maximum amount of 60,000 € for the whole time period (3 years) and paid in annual tranches in light of the progress of the project.
Priority Questions in 2023
- This 2023 call for proposals exclusively targets initiatives that answer one (or more) of these 3 questions:
- How can the marketing of local products be remunerative for peasants and other actors in the value chain, beyond niche markets, and be a vector of quality food produced and processed in the country or sub-region?
- How can local products produced by family farmers gain sustainable access to institutional markets?
- How can West African consumers and the organizations that represent them become full-fledged actors in the massive consumption of healthy local products?
- Note: If your project does not answer at least one of these questions in a central and specific way, it will not be selected.
Eligibility Criteria
- Concerning applicants, the call is open to:
- non-profit legal entities such as: West African farmers’ organizations, West African NGOs, “support NGOs” active in West Africa or in European Union (to the extent that they work with local partners), research and/or training organizations. Cooperatives are also eligible. Public institutions as well as local authorities, are not eligible as “applicants”;
- organizations registered for more than one year;
- organizations who have previously conducted action projects in the area of agriculture and food;
- Concerning partners, the call is open to non-profit legal entities such as farmers’ organizations, West African NGOs, “support NGOs” active in West Africa or in European Union research and/or training organizations. Cooperatives are also eligible as main partners.
- Local authorities play a fundamental role in food systems. This is why they can be main partners, provided that their role is central in the project and well explained;
- Public institutions are not eligible as main partners but can be part of the “other partners” of the project;
- The partners take part in defining and/or implementing the project;
- Partners of European (EU) organizations play a leading role in putting the proposed project in place.
- Final beneficiaries of the action cannot be partners.
Important: The call for projects is reserved for proposals for actions in formalized partnership between a West African organization and a European organization (EU). The lead organization can be West African or European (EU).
For more information, visit CFSI.