Friends of the World Food Program

1. Briefly describe WFP’s current food assistance operations in Burkina Faso.

WFP’s overall goal in Burkina Faso is to support socio-economic development throughout the country. Assistance is provided through a number of different programs to enhance the livelihoods of families living below the poverty line, reduce their vulnerability to natural disasters and food insecurity and help them adapt to a changing economic and physical environment. WFP assistance is primarily aimed at helping the most food-insecure populations, for whom food assistance truly makes a difference.

The WFP Country Program in Burkina Faso focuses on providing assistance to chronically poor and food-insecure families living in rural areas. It targets 80,000 primary schoolchildren and 205,000 illiterate people in an effort to increase the overall literacy level in Burkina Faso, which is amongst the lowest in the world. This program also provides assistance to some 25,000 people suffering from HIV/AIDS or tuberculosis, as well as 50,000 subsistence farmers living in the regions most affected by climate change and natural disasters. 

The WFP Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation (PRRO) is a nutrition project that aims to reverse growing undernutrition trends by providing supplementary food assistance to 500,000 undernourished children under age 3, as well as pregnant and nursing women. WFP also runs workshops with mothers about nutrition, care and hygiene to help prevent undernutrition.

Soaring food prices continue to hit Burkina Faso hard. To help urban populations in need, WFP launched an Emergency Relief and Response Operation in February 2009 to target 120,000 vulnerable people in Burkina Faso. The purchasing power of these households has plummeted during the economic crisis, and WFP is trying to assist them through the distribution of vouchers that can be exchanged for both food and non-food items. A survey conducted among 140,000 households in the two main cities, Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, asked questions related to food-security issues in order to identify the most vulnerable households that would receive the vouchers.

One family member will be given up to six $3 vouchers each month for a maximum of 6 months to buy corn, cooking oil, sugar, salt and soap at local shops that have signed agreements with WFP. These families will also receive distributions of Plumpy'Doz — a sweet-tasting paste made from peanuts, peanut oil, powdered milk and powdered sugar and fortified with vitamins and minerals for young children. These distributions will be extended to children of poor households that were not selected to receive vouchers, reaching about 76,000 children under age 2.

Burkina Faso is also part of the pilot for the Purchase for Progress (P4P) program. P4P activities officially started in February, and a baseline purchase from five small farmers’ associations is being finalized.

2. What are the biggest challenges in delivering food to WFP beneficiaries in Burkina Faso? How is WFP overcoming them?

Actually transporting food to those who need it in Burkina Faso is the biggest challenge for WFP. Poor road conditions make it difficult to access parts of the country, especially since the primary logistics vehicles are pickups and other small trucks. Food delivery is particularly challenging during the rainy season, when the most inaccessible areas become more at risk for food insecurity.

3. WFP uses community-based nutrition interventions to assist young children and pregnant and nursing mothers in Burkina Faso. Could you please describe this type of assistance? What successes have these programs shown so far?

WFP uses supplementary feeding programs to provide assistance to children under 3 years of age and pregnant and nursing women in 700 government health centers and more than 500 villages throughout the country. Partnerships with other organizations, including Catholic Relief Services and Africare, ensure the delivery of nutritional assistance at the community level. In 2008, nearly 500,000 women and children were assisted by WFP in Burkina Faso.

It is very important to provide this community-based assistance, because oftentimes, the most vulnerable women and children cannot access nutritional centers due to large distances between villages and cities and due to women’s enormous workloads in the fields. The community-based organizations are working directly in the villages to monitor health and nutritional conditions, distribute the supplementary food assistance and implement educational activities to teach families about nutrition.

This project has shown significant progress. Its large scale and integrated approach have contributed to significantly lowering the prevalence of undernutrition in the targeted regions from 17 to 13 percent. Furthermore, the incidence of low birth weight has dropped from 16 to 11 percent. While these results show a positive trend, the prevalence of severe undernutrition is still high, and the program should be continued in the medium term.

4. Burkina Faso was identified as one of the countries for the pilot of the Purchase for Progress program. Briefly explain why Burkina Faso was chosen and how this will change the way WFP provides assistance in the country.

Burkina Faso plays a key role in WFP regional food procurement, providing more than 16,000 tons of cereals for WFP programs in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali and Niger each year. Given the country’s much larger potential for local purchases, in 2007 WFP tried to build capacity among small-scale farmers so they could become direct suppliers to WFP. In early 2008, a pilot program successfully purchased about 165 tons of cereals from small farmers’ associations.

The P4P program will introduce innovative practices to reduce the risks faced by farmers. These practices, which include purchasing directly from farmers’ associations, will help develop secure markets for farmers’ surpluses. The program will also focus on developing local opportunities to process food, which will increase the availability of nutritious products in local markets. With assistance from partners who specialize in enhancing agricultural productivity, the P4P program will improve farmers’ access to technologies and practices that can enhance the quantity and quality of their crop production.

Buying locally considerably reduces transport costs, making it possible to procure larger quantities of food. While WFP can provide assistance to a larger number of vulnerable people, local food purchases also contribute to the development of the national economy.

Based on the positive experiences of 2008, Burkina Faso is one of the first five P4P pilot countries. The program was officially approved in late February 2009, and since then, about 550 tons of sorghum and nearly 100 tons of beans have been purchased from five farmers’ organizations.

A mother and child after receiving vouchers from WFP.

What has touched me most is seeing beneficiaries light up with joy after receiving WFP food assistance; people who express their relief and gratitude to WFP.

During the recent distribution of food vouchers, the need for WFP’s work was driven home. When we arrived at 1 of the 10 voucher distribution sites in the city of Ouagadougou, the WFP car approached a crowd of approximately 500 people patiently waiting their turn to receive the food vouchers. When WFP staff exited the car, the crowd spontaneously and enthusiastically applauded the staff whose efforts brought this program to fruition. As we passed through the crowd, several individuals approached us to shake our hands, express their gratitude for that which they were to receive and offer a heartfelt “barka,” or “thank you.” Sometimes, one may temporarily lose sight of how the day-to-day work at the WFP office benefits the lives of so many people, but on this day, the impact was more than apparent.

6. What drew you to working with WFP in the first place?