ALFA Sahel 2020 is designed as a 2 day interactive learning forum, in which participants will:   

  • Learn from the participants’ diverse experience, research and evidence relating to climate resilience among diverse vulnerable people and their landscapes in the Sahel.
  • Deepen discussions on priority themes and explore drivers, barriers and opportunities for climate resilient and secure people and landscapes.
  • Collectively generate messages to inform policy decision makers, donors, programmes and researchers in their efforts to address climate and conflict risks.  

ALFA Sahel 2020 will explore two main themes:

  1. Resilient people: interconnected livelihoods in a future climate
  2. Resilient landscapes: natural resource management in multi-user landscapes

Some of the challenging questions the conference may explore include:

  • How can farmers and pastoralists, neighbouring ethnic groups, and the women, men and youth in their communities collectively manage climate risks, sustain livelihoods and regenerate scarce resources they all rely on, without recourse to conflict? 
  • What is the future for how these multiple resource users make use of, access and govern natural resources across ecosystem landscapes and over time?
  • How can complex gender, diversity and cultural dimensions be integrated into solutions?
  • What adaptive capacities, governance systems and innovation are needed? 
  • What is the value and how can we enhance multi-stakeholder, multi-level, multi-sector decision making,  and coordination in practice and policies? 
  • What is needed from the triple nexus linking humanitarian, development and peace efforts in the context of future climate risks and uncertainties? 

What you will experience at ALFA Sahel 2020:

Participating practitioners, researchers and policymakers will share their expertise, learn from each other and work together through a range of event formats exploring the overarching objective and themes.  Panel discussions, sharing of evidence and interactive group sessions will be facilitated in a structured and participatory way to result in co-development of lessons, messages and calls for action by participants.  The event objective will be met through a systematic approach to sharing, learning and co-developing outcomes over the two days. 

The workshop language will be primarily French. Facilitation will be bilingual and simultaneous interpretation French-English, English-French will be provided. Presentations and plenary sessions will be kept to a minimum to allow for a rich interaction among all participants.

The Second International Scientific Conference on Climate Change hosted by AGRHYMET will be in Niamey on April 1-3, 2020.  Participants and organisers of ALFA Sahel 2020 will have the opportunity to share learnings and messages developed by practitioners, policymakers and researchers in the discussions held during the AGRYHET conference.  The events are organised separately.

The full Forum agenda will be shared in early March 2020.