This evaluation was conducted by Ulrich Diasso (PhD) for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the AGRHYMET Regional Centre under the Swedish-supported Sahel Resilience Project. We are grateful to our national and international partners for their availability and support to online and on-site interviews with relevant experts and site visits: national meteorological and hydrological institutions, disaster risk management and early warning services in the seven partner countries to the Sahel Resilience Project, as well as officials from regional bodies, namely the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD), the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), the Volta Basin Authority (VBA) and the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC). We would like to express our deep gratitude to international partners and UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Regional Office for West Africa and its office in Senegal, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the Institute for Security Studies for Africa (ISS) and the CIMA Foundation (International Centre for Environmental Monitoring) of the Italian National Centre of Civil Protection.

i) The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a pioneer in establishing regulations for the exercise of cross-border transhumance, a somewhat controversial livestock production system in relation to its economic, social and environmental impacts, and the conflicts of access to natural resources that are sometimes associated with it. ii) Since 1998, ECOWAS has been experimenting with a set of legal and technical instruments to provide a framework for the exercise of this multi-functional credited activity, which makes it a powerful means of strengthening the resilience of populations in general, and pastoralist and herder households in particular, on the one hand, and promoting social and regional integration in West Africa, on the other.