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Country: Togo

Togo: Azizi — L’ambassadeur itinerant de la paix

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Posted April 21, 2023 .
1 min read.

Dans le nord du Togo, le Programme Régional d’Appui Aux Pays Côtiers de l’USAID/OTI s’est associé au Conseil National de la Jeunesse et à Timbuktu Institute pour former 120 jeunes leaders sur, le plaidoyer en faveur de la paix et la cohésion sociale. Après la formation, l’un des jeunes, Azizi Sedou, forme et sensibilise sa communauté à la prévention des conflits et au renforcement de la cohésion sociale.

Azizi et ses pairs ont sensibilisé plus de 1 000 hommes, femmes et jeunes dans la région des Savanes et continuent d’atteindre d’autres membres de leurs communautés.

Togo: Azizi Sedou — The door-to-door peace ambassador

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Posted April 21, 2023 .
1 min read.

In northern Togo, USAID/OTI’s Littorals Regional Initiative partnered with the Conseil National de la Jeunesse and the Timbuktu Institute to train 120 youth leaders on peace advocacy and social cohesion.

One of the graduates of the training program, Azizi Sedou, goes from house to house and engages residents about the need for social cohesion and conflict prevention. Azizi and his peers have engaged more than 1,000 men, women and youth across the Savanes Region and continue to reach more residents.

Produced by Littorals Regional Initiative on behalf of USAID/OTI. The opinions expressed in this video are of the interviewees and may not reflect the position of the U.S. government.

Art for peace: Cinkassé youth use illustration to promote positive community relationships

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Posted August 8, 2022 .
By Atiewin Mbillah-Lawson .
3 min read.

After Dougnoanou Tchitchane completed senior high school a decade ago, she struggled to find a job in Togo’s rural community of Cinkassé and a lack of funds meant she could not further her education. To avoid remaining idle, she used her passion for art to pass the time, spending the days sketching and painting on a canvas that would often reflect her feelings.

When her uncle told her about a drawing competition to promote peace, social cohesion, and prevent violent extremism supported by the USAID/OTI Littorals Regional Initiative/Programme Regional d’Appui aux Pays Côtiers, she became excited and saw it as a positive step for herself and community.

“The armed robberies and killings were becoming one too many. We were unsure whether the perpetrators were from our village, and no one wanted to discuss it. I hoped the art competition would help start a conversation,” Dougnoanou confessed.

Authorities in Togo’s Savanes region are concerned about increasing insecurity, illiteracy, and poverty. The situation is more pronounced in rural communities like Cinkassé, which borders Burkina Faso, where insurgency is rife, and Ghana. Amid concerns about spillover of violent extremist activities into areas with high levels of illiteracy, the competition’s organizers recognized that illustrations or other visual elements would be more effective to raise awareness. The drawing competition aimed to provide local youth with the opportunity to lead peacebuilding efforts in their communities.

Dougnoanou was among 300 youth from across the eight cantons of Cinkassé to apply in the first round of the competition. “To convey the message of peace, I submitted a drawing of two men arguing, followed by the symbol of peace that I illustrated with two hands clenching” says Dougnoanou.

The 27-year-old was thrilled to find out she was one of 20 shortlisted entries, earning her an opportunity to participate in a series of training sessions to improve her illustration skills, drawing, awareness-raising cartoons, and basic techniques to develop an idea or message in drawings. Dougnoanou says, “the training significantly improved my skills; now I can influence my peers and the community using the strokes of my brush.”

For the next round of the competition, the 20 trained youth gathered perceptions on peace, social cohesion, co-existence, and preventing violent extremism in their neighborhoods. These interactions inspired drawings for the final phase of the competition, where a jury would select the three best illustrations.

“In my design, I drew a Christian, Muslim and Traditionalist together on one mat to send the message of religious tolerance,” Dougnoanou explained.

Drawings from Dougnoanou and the other 19 semi-finalists were printed in a booklet and presented to a panel of judges and local officials. “I was nervous about meeting the authorities because it was my first time!” exclaimed Dougnoanou, “after meeting the Prefect, Mayors, and traditional leaders, to present the booklet, I felt a sense of importance; my opinions also matter to them.”

At the end of the competition, all 20 finalists were awarded tablets, with the top three receiving mobile phones and a laptop for the first position holder. Though Dougnoanou’s entry did not make it into the top three, her ranking among the 20 finalists and the training makes her feel like a winner.

Using their new tools and skills, Dougnoanou and the other youth participants are communicating and sharing new ideas about how to encourage peacebuilding in their community. “We are young people who have been equipped to convey peace messages through our drawings. Many people understand our messages, and we are creating awareness. The skills we have acquired can also become an income-generating activity for us which is a plus,” Dougnoanou concludes.

The youth also conducted a series of community sensitizations and have reached more than 400 residents. Dougnoanou now leads discussions with her peers about challenges facing the security of her community. “This engagement sparked in me the desire to join youth associations to be able to raise awareness about the dangers of conflict and violent extremism. I carry a copy of the booklet everywhere I go.”

The booklet and individual drawings are in high demand among authorities in Cinkassé, who use them to educate the public about preventing violent extremism. More than 1,000 copies have been printed and distributed in schools, offices, and community centers.

ANKA: Connecting African artisans to the global market

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Posted May 20, 2022 .
By Sabra Ayres .
4 min read.

An African start-up that created an online marketplace for mostly women-led small businesses and artisans to sell worldwide recently raised $6.1 million for expansion, thanks to an initial $1.5 million investment from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s West Africa Trade & Investment Hub (Trade Hub) aimed at leveraging outside funding. 

ANKA is an online marketplace platform working with 2,000 African micro-, small- and medium enterprises. Sellers use the digital export platform to sell their apparel, jewelry, decorative arts and designer fabrics to customers around the world.

ANKA online marketplace platform.

Nearly 80 percent of the sellers on ANKA are women engaged in apparel and accessories making, many of them from small workshops or working in their homes. Historically, selling on Afrikrea, ANKA’s original name, raised businesses’ income by 50 percent year-over-year, according to Charles Polet, a Public-Private Partnership Manager at the Trade Hub. 

The $6.1 million in new investment supports a potential job creation of 27,000 based on ANKA’s goal to onboard 3,000 new merchants to its platform within the next three years. More than 50 percent will be women.   

The Trade Hub manages a pipeline of more than $1.2 billion in transactions and has engaged with more than 700 private companies, as well as business associations, development finance institutions and government agencies. It is actively working in 14 countries across 23 value chains.  

During its first two and a half years, the project awarded $70 million in grants to 75 public and private sector co-investment partners, including CrossBoundary and Cordaid Investment Management. Collectively, these co-investments are expected to generate $560 million in private investment, create 59,000 sustainable jobs and facilitate more than $456 million in exports in agriculture, manufactured goods, energy and services by the end of the program. The private investment generated is so significant that it represents eight times the value of the Trade Hub funds.  

CrossBoundary entered a $1.5 million co-investment partnership with the Trade Hub in February 2021. Under the pay-for-results partnership, CrossBoundary identifies potential investments, such as it did with Afrikrea in 2021. The firm then leverages its USAID-backed $1.5 million investment to encourage outside investors to help finance the potential in other African small and medium enterprises. While the Trade Hub put up the initial $1.5 million, CrossBoundary is committed to raising an additional $14 million in outside investments for at least five small- and medium-sized enterprises.  

As of November, CrossBoundary is facilitating $50 million of private capital for 12 small and medium enterprises in agricultural processing, light manufacturing and commerce within eight West African countries, including Cameroon, Liberia, Togo, Ghana, Nigeria and Mali. The investments will promote regional trade, U.S. exports, the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, women’s entrepreneurship, and market-driven supply chains in post-conflict and near-conflict areas.  

ANKA’s focus on women-led businesses caught the attention of CrossBoundary, an investment firm that seeks to raise capital for small- and medium enterprises typically underserved by the financing products available, for example, women-led agriculture or handicraft businesses in West Africa. Such enterprises often face prohibitive transaction costs associated with raising funds for expansion and growth. 

Originally conceived as Afrikrea, ANKA’s online market lets small artisans and sellers tap into the global market to increase opportunities and profit, and get paid faster, all on one platform.

Afrikrea original platform from ANKA.

“At ANKA, our mission is to ‘Bridge Africa and The World,’” said Janis Kouassi, who has been with ANKA since its start in 2019, in a recent blog post. “As an Ivorian woman, that speaks volume to me. Being a part of something that has never been done before, i.e., export Africans’ know-how rather than sell things to Africans, was extremely attractive to me. Being in alignment with your company’s mission and values is key to one’s personal and professional growth.” 

ANKA is a U.S. registered company with key operations in Côte d’Ivoire. It’s original name, Afrikrea, is derived from a French play on words, merging “Africa” with the French would for design, “creation.” 

The substantial investments will allow ANKA to expand its reach to bring on 3,000 new, small- and medium-sized enterprises in Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria.  

“For many of our sellers, ANKA allows them to reach markets that were out of reach just selling on their own,” said Ilan Mouyal, the head of acquisitions at ANKA. “This expansion will mean more artisans, particularly women, can share in that success.” 

In addition, supporting ANKA in turn promotes regional trade under Africa Continental Frea Trade Area, or AfCFTA, Polet says, referring to a free-trade area brokered in 2018 to include 54 of the 55 African Union nations. The AfCFTA is the largest free-trade market in the world by member states after the World Trade Organization. The creation of the free-trade region aims to deepen the economic integration of the African continent.  

“It’s not easy to fund African start-ups, especially those that help and target microbusinesses,” Polet says. “This is a success story because it builds on promoting U.S. investments and U.S. trade, while at the same time promotes income for micro-ateliers in Africa.”

West Africa – Littorals Regional Initiative

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Program.
2 min read.

In Western Africa and the Sahel, longstanding social, political and economic weaknesses have fueled the spread of violent extremism for decades.

Though many Coastal West African countries have relatively functional state institutions and are more resilient than their Sahelian counterparts, they exhibit many of the same weaknesses making them fertile ground for criminal activities and the expansion of violent extremist organizations.

The Littorals Regional Initiative (LRI) is designed to work at the community level to support counterparts in target areas to withstand the increasing pressures of violent extremism by addressing factors of instability. As an element of the broader U.S. government goal of preventing the spread and consolidation of violent extremist organizations in Coastal West Africa, this USAID/Office of Transitions Initiative (OTI) program increases community resilience and strengthens the capacity of local actors and governments to respond to destabilizing threats.

Working in Ghana, Togo and Benin, the program supports local partner efforts to build resilience (such as helping them manage local conflicts and to support improved inter- and intra-community dynamics among key groups) and to help bring a voice to excluded groups, particularly, women, youth and ethnic minorities.

The USAID program leverages the Office of Transitions Initiative’s model of reaching the most vulnerable locations, particularly along border areas, to support key populations that are striving to maintain security and peace in their communities. The Littorals Regional Initiative uses targeted grants to local organizations and considers various factors when making strategic engagement decisions, including the program’s ability to be impactful at the community level.

Program Goals

LRI  leverages the OTI model of reaching the most vulnerable locations, particularly along border areas, in order to support key stakeholders who are striving to maintain security and peace in their communities. The program aims to enable local and national actors to increase community stability and strengthen social cohesion in targeted communities in order to help them become better prepared to withstand external shocks and threats.

LRI focuses on increasing community stability by empowering local and national actors to address vulnerabilities to violence, conflict, and violent extremism. By strengthening the capabilities and motivation of key stakeholders through increased awareness and skills in areas such as PVE awareness, advocacy, communication, conflict resolution, and early warning monitoring, the program aims to foster a sense of ownership and proactive intervention for the common good. Additionally, by enhancing the capacity of these stakeholders to engage with their communities on peace and security issues, the program seeks to promote sustained positive engagements and collective action to mitigate threats and increase stability.

LRI aims to strengthen cohesion in targeted communities by fostering sustained, positive inter- and intra-community engagements and increasing the social inclusion of marginalized groups. By encouraging communities to interact with marginalized groups, LRI helps identify common ground, reducing opportunities for conflict and exploitation by violent extremist organizations. Additionally, by highlighting the value of including marginalized groups and the risks of their isolation, LRI works to change attitudes and perspectives, promoting greater social inclusion and reducing grievances that could lead to conflict.

West Africa – Trade & Investment Hub

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Program.
2 min read.

The West Africa Trade & Investment Hub Activity catalyzed economic growth in the region by attracting private investment, strengthening business networks and boosting agricultural and trade sectors in Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and other West African countries.

West Africa’s economic potential, with a population of over 360 million, faces hurdles such as political instability, limited investment and weak business networks, hindering economic growth and development across the region. These challenges have particularly impacted smallholder farmers, limiting their production and profits and exacerbating food insecurity and poverty.

The Trade Hub employed a market-based approach to address the economic challenges in West Africa. The program expanded the agricultural sector and enhanced the production and profits of smallholder farmers through innovative farming practices and technology adoption by strengthening links between producers and markets across various value chains, including maize, rice, soybean, cowpea, and aquaculture. As part of Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, the Trade Hub’s activities made smallholder farmers more food secure and raised household incomes.

Additionally, the program enhanced national, regional and international markets for goods like apparel, cashew, and cocoa, facilitating trade with the U.S. in leveraging the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The Trade Hub also prioritized gender inclusion, empowering women to increase household incomes, acquire new skills, and establish small businesses. Through co-investment funds totaling $60 million over five years, the program aims to attract $300 million in private-sector investment, improve business operations, and increase access to financing for exporters, ultimately driving economic growth and development in West Africa.

The Trade Hub brings together an experienced consortium of implementers and a broad network of private sector partners. The project is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and implemented by Creative Associates International. Creative’s partners include Dalberg, Pragma, Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture, Connexus Corp. and Fraym.

Program Achievements

The Trade Hub administered $60 million in co-investment funds to attract $300 million in private-sector investment, stimulating economic growth and development in West Africa through increased investment in agriculture, trade, and other sectors.

By employing innovative farming practices and technology adoption, the program enhanced agricultural productivity and profits for smallholder farmers in Nigeria and other West African countries, leading to increased production levels and income growth for farmers.

The Trade Hub worked to strengthen business networks and market linkages in West Africa, evidenced by increased trade volumes and partnerships among businesses, both locally and internationally, facilitating economic growth and trade expansion in the region.

The program prioritized gender inclusion and youth empowerment, to increase access to economic opportunities for women and youth in West Africa, leading to household income growth, skills development, and the establishment of small businesses, ultimately contributing to poverty reduction and sustainable development.

West Africa – REWARD I & II

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Program.
2 min read.

West African states have experienced multiple incidents of violence and conflict. Preventing and mitigating such political violence is essential to building a stable and healthy democratic society.

The five-year “Reacting to Early Warning and Response Data in West Africa” project (called REWARD) and its three-year follow-on, REWARD II, supported the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) use of innovative technology and applied best practices to detect and respond to conflict across the region from political violence, violent extremism and ethnic conflict to sectarian tensions, perpetration of atrocities and organized crime.

REWARD II further addressed democratic backsliding in target countries through a combination of approaches that prevented or mitigated conflict related to governments’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic and helped to address existing security vulnerabilities that were aggravated due to COVID-19-related limitations and restrictions.

This U.S. Agency for International Development program was implemented by Creative Associates International.

Building on Creative’s expertise in early warning and electoral security, the project supported ECOWAS’ goal of catalyzing a sustainable culture of conflict prevention throughout West Africa and boosted the capacity of ECOWAS member states and local partners to prevent electoral violence. REWARD also worked with ECOWAS on a suite of early warning and early response processes and planning tools, including the Joint Analysis and Response Planning (JARP) Compendium. This compendium of frameworks and manuals details a holistic and collaborative human security early warning and early response system.

Civil society and ECOWAS member states were key partners in helping to improve the effectiveness of conflict response initiatives.

Creative carried out the project in partnership with two nonprofit organizations: Fund for Peace, a global leader in early warning and conflict assessment with experience in more than 50 countries; and Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, a leading peacebuilding implementer with programs in more than 25 conflict-affected countries.

Community Risk and Vulnerability Assessments by Country: