The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), has reassured of its commitment to supporting food security and building resilience in the North East region of Nigeria. The Head of FAO’s North East Office, Mr. Alhassan Cisse made this known in Maiduguri, Borno state, while declaring open a workshop on “Strengthening the Organisational Capacity of Local and National Actors (LNAs)”, for effective Emergency Response in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states.
Cisse, who was represented by the Head of Emergency Programme of the office, Ms. Sahar Fallal-Ali, said that over the years, the organisation had invested in building capacities of LNAs for better implementation of its programmes with funding from donors. “For instance in 2022 alone, FAO trained 51 Farmers Field School (FFS) facilitators and 85 other partners. This is aimed at strengthening the capacity of local and national actors in humanitarian response. It is also for LNAs to take leading role in the humanitarian response and also to take a more leading role in the coordination mechanism for the LNAs to improve their effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian action”, he said.
He mentioned that the workshop would also strengthen the capacities of the LNAs based on the gaps that had been identified to enable them have an effective participation in planning and implementing humanitarian and resilience programmes as well as timely responses to humanitarian crises in agriculture and food security to promote resilience. Meanwhile, he disclosed that FAO is commencing and heading the localisation agenda in Nigeria where it conducted a gap assessment of 20 LNAs in the North-East with funding from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA).
