About the Regional Humanitarian Fund for West and Central Africa

The Regional Humanitarian Fund for West and Central Africa (herein after "RHFWCA") builds on the success of the Country Based Pooled Funds model with the aim of extending them to more varied contexts, such as the Sahel crisis, and in a more cost-effective way.

In doing so, the RHFWCA:
 

  • Supports the humanitarian response in countries where establishing a Country Based Pooled Fund (CBPF) is not optimal.
  • Supports a coherent humanitarian response to regional and interconnected emergencies and promotes cross-border collaboration and synergies between country envelopes allocations.
  • Expands access to direct funding for NGOs, with a focus on national and/or local organizations.
  • Promotes global initiatives that benefit from the quality of aid and humanitarian response.

The RHFWCA, based in the OCHA Regional Office for West and Central Africa in Dakar (Senegal), manages country envelopes, which are activated or deactivated according to humanitarian needs, available resources, and donor commitments. The funding mechanism was launched in June 2021 with the first country envelope established in Niger (September 2021), followed by Burkina Faso (February 2022), and Mali (March 2023). 

The activation of an envelope will be approved by the Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC) upon the recommendation of OCHA after consultations with various stakeholders, including donors and operational partners.

The conditions for opening an envelope include:

  • Formal and explicit request from the Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) to the ERC.
  • Strong rationale based on the scale of humanitarian needs, operational requirements and coordination capacities.
  • Donor engagement that achieves a specified minimum contribution threshold.
  • The commitment of the HC to ensure appropriate governance and management of funds with the support of an Advisory Board.

As is currently the case for CBPFs, a minimum threshold of financial commitments, adapted to the country context, will be established to activate a country envelope. This will help avoid the dilution of resources and ensure they are sufficient to support a strategic allocation in each country.

The vision of the Regional Fund is to save lives and alleviate the suffering of crisis-affected people while adopting and promoting a coherent transnational approach to regional emergencies and humanitarian issues. The Fund prioritizes actions that have strategic and catalytic effects on the humanitarian response in the region, promoting synergies between country envelopes and remaining dynamic, flexible, and agile in the fluid environment and changing circumstances on the ground. 

The Fund prioritizes the most vulnerable, increasing access to aid, particularly for those in dire need in hard-to-reach and remote areas. The Fund supports a “as local as possible and as international as necessary” response, recognizing its role as one of few humanitarian financing instruments that directly support national and local organizations in the Central Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin.