ReliefWeb

In Numbers

728 mt of food assistance distributed

US$ 0.67 m cash-based transfers made

US$ 10.5 m six months (December 2018-May 2019) net funding requirements, representing 17% of total

145,000 people assisted in NOVEMBER 2018

Strategic Updates

• During the second regular session of WFP’s Executive Board in November, the new Country Strategic Plan (CSP) of Mauritania was officially approved for the next four years (2019-2022), for a total budget of USD 132 million. The strategy will combine direct interventions serving protective and productive safety-net functions – including multi-year community-based resilience packages with increasing capacity strengthening efforts aimed at equipping the country with the right set of Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) tools, processes and institutional framework to address both the underlying causes of structural poverty and transient food insecurity. This approach will, over the long run, allow for a progressive transition of programmatic responsibilities to the Government.

• Lean season interventions in support of drought-affected people officially ended on 29 November. WFP supported communities where levels of malnutrition and food insecurity were still particularly high (according to the August 2018 SMART survey). Throughout all the response, WFP was able to provide life-saving assistance to 331,500 people (78 percent) of the initially planned beneficiaries (427,000).
This number further represents 61 percent of the total people initially planned by the food security sector response (538,400 people). In December, food security and nutrition partners will hold a lesson learned exercise to discuss relative strengths and weaknesses in terms of early warning system, response’s planning and implementation as well as to draw the lessons learned.

• UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) operations are likely to end in December 2018 if no additional funding is identified before then.
WFP/UNHAS is striving to continue fundraising this common and efficient service. The shutdown of UNHAS operations will hamper the support that vulnerable households and communities require and will constrain the operationalization of humanitarian and development interventions, while raising several concerns since humanitarian access in the country will be less safe and effective.

• As part of the WFP Sahel resilience scale up plan, WFP Mauritania continued to scale up its resilience interventions in priority communities, promoting and implementing a longer-term approach, which combines various protective and productive interventions (e.g. food assistance for assets, school feeding, nutritional support and lean season response to safeguard early resilience gains) in a geographically focused, integrated and multi-year manner. This WFP regional approach is part of the wider framework of United Nations Sahel Initiative (UNISS) and the Sahel Humanitarian-DevelopmentPeace Nexus in Action.

• The country office engaged in the WFP’s annual campaign on the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence (GBV). WFP staff in Mauritania participated in various activities to raise awareness on the different types of GBV, its causes and consequences. The links to food security and WFP work were emphasized, as well as the role everyone needs to play in working toward a world free of genderbased violence.

• WFP continues to work jointly with African Risk Capacity (ARC) to provide technical support to the Government in customizing the index which will be used for the 2019 drought insurance policy, as part of the Replica pilot initiative.

• WFP, UNHCR and other actors are working to facilitate a gradual shift away from care of refugees in the M’berra camp to enhance refugees’ self-reliance and the resilience of local populations.
The refugees’ profiling on the basis of their food security and livelihoods profile has been finalized. Next step includes the finalization of the targeting methodology (by January 2019), the development of a messaging to sensitize refugees on the new targeting approach and the implementation of the strategy by the first quarter of 2019.