About us

The pastoral surveillance and early warning system in the Sahel is part of an ongoing initiative within Action Against Hunger for several years aimed at establishing monitoring and analysis tools, as well as response mechanisms to food and nutritional crises in the Sahel. This initiative is particularly focused on areas with agropastoral and pastoral livelihoods.

The goal of the program is to enhance the capacity of stakeholders in the pastoral sector to respond to crises by establishing monitoring tools and real-time data collection systems with sufficient geographical coverage. The data utilized is derived from satellite acquisitions covering the entire Sahelian region, complemented and nuanced by field surveys, providing both quantitative and qualitative information.

Action Against Hunger conducts an annual assessment of biomass production in the western Sahel. These analyses specifically target pastoral and agropastoral areas, enabling humanitarian and livestock stakeholders to anticipate and potentially prevent crises related to droughts.

The BioGenerator, a tool developed by Action Against Hunger, utilizes satellite data from the Copernicus service to analyze the production of plant biomass during the rainy season. Detecting anomalies in production helps target areas vulnerable to droughts. The BioGenerator is employed by the Early Warning Systems (Système d’Alerte Précoce) in various countries.

The instant biomass production data is updated every ten days and is accessible for visualization and download on the interactive mapping platform: GeoSahel.info

An automated system is utilized to weekly send a questionnaire to a network of collectors known as pastoral surveillance relays or pastoral sentinels. This network operates in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal in collaboration with the livestock technical services of each of these countries. Additionally, in certain countries, there is collaboration with the Billital Maroobé Network RBM, a significant pastoral association in the Sahel. Since 2020, a partnership established with Veterinarians Without Borders Belgium VSF-B has allowed for the pooling of collector networks in Burkina Faso and Niger, thereby increasing spatial coverage and density.