The stakeholders involved in the project to Improve Food and Nutrition Governance and Sustainable Agriculture in the Sahel and West Africa (PAGR-SANAD), notably ECOWAS, UEMOA, CILSS and CEI/PREGEC region through ROPPA, have been heavily involved in improving the food and nutrition situation for many years. On an institutional level, nutrition has been considered, following the accession of all the countries in the Sahel and West Africa region to the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement. Almost all the countries have revised their nutrition policies and strategies in line with the multi-sectoral approach. However, the issues of nutrition-sensitive sustainable food security remain a major challenge.

In September 2007, a two-day workshop was held in Burkina Faso for policy and decision makers from health, agriculture, and the private sector to work together to build and strengthen collaboration between their respective sectors. The participants recognised that the growing incidence of diet-related chronic diseases and the persistence of malnutrition and food insecurity in ECOWAS member states requires urgent and concerted actions across sectors.

The West African Health Organization (WAHO) is a specialized Public Health Agency of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). WAHO coordinates the ECOWAS Nutrition Forum which was established in 1996 by the ECOWAS Commission as a mechanism to organize the network of nutrition actors and stakeholders within the 15 ECOWAS member states. The overarching goal of the Nutrition Forum is to increase the visibility of nutrition and regional cross-ectoral dialogues and actions that would result in impact oriented food and nutrition programmes. Nutrition advocacy is thus a strategic role of the Forum aimed at raisingawareness about key nutrition issues among policy and decision makers at national and regional levels.

Much of the production of indigenous/traditional food crops is done by individual small-scale farmers who sell their produce in rural and informal markets with minimal returns and so production is often limited. A major constraint to expanding production is the need to improve seed quality and production techniques. As mentioned earlier, lack of attention and social changes have led to the under-production and under-utilization of these food crops despite their many advantages not only nutritionally but in their adaptation to the variable environments of West Africa. For example, sorghum, millet, bambara groundnut are more drought tolerant than the introduced grains and grain legumes. Fonio (hungry rice), has a relatively short growing cycle and is well adapted to the highly variable rainfall of the Guinean and Sahelian zones. Indigenous leafy vegetables currently have few natural pests and are less demanding of soil and water than nonindigenous varieties.