Call for projects: Promotion of family farming in West Africa – Pafao 2025

Objectives

The general objective of the Pafao program is to:

• Promote local initiatives to strengthen access to healthy, quality food, produced by viable and sustainable West African family farming and processed in the country or in the sub-region, while ensuring a fair distribution of added value in the value chains (this is the present call for projects);
• Capitalize (produce knowledge) to draw useful lessons beyond initiatives, for organizations and for advocacy actors. The challenge is to contribute to documentation of the sustainability of this agricultural and food model likely to challenge decision-makers to take these issues into account in public policies;
• Support the construction of scaling strategies so that successful initiatives do not remain marginal but occupy more economic space.

In a context of competition with imports, this amounts to supporting “local consumption”, understood as “the local and national consumption of West African family farming products“.

The programme combines an economic approach with an approach to influence the political and legislative environment at national and regional level so that it is more favourable to sustainable family farming.

The programme provides financial support to local and peasant initiatives in West Africa that can sustainably meet the growing demand of domestic markets and ensure a better distribution of value added. These initiatives contribute to:

• Strengthen and/or maintain the availability of quality local products from sustainable family farming in rural and urban markets – consumer markets ;
• developing sustainable food systems.

Priority

• Priority will be given to proposals based on one of the following two approaches:
  • accessing major, formalized markets such as contracts with public institutions and businesses (school canteens, prisons, hospitals, hotels, supermarkets, etc.).
  • targeting the role of West African consumers and their representative organizations in promoting local consumption.

Funding 

• The minimum contribution from the Pafao Support Fund is 10,000 euros. The maximum amount that can be requested depends on the duration of the submitted initiative.
• The maximum contribution has been set to 20,000 euros for a 12-month initiative, 40,000 euros for a 24-month initiative or 60,000 euros for a 36-month initiative.

In 2025, the Pafao programme will make available two financial support funds:

Fund A, to which the 12- to 36-month initiatives will be allocated:

• in accordance with these guidelines;
• implemented in the following 16 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo

Fund B to which initiatives with a duration of 12 to 23 months ending no later than 30/11/2026 will be allocated:

• in accordance with these guidelines;
• ending no later than 30/11/2026;
• not having co-financing from the French Development Agency (AFD) since they will be integrated into the Nourishing Lands programme, which benefits from AFD co-financing;
• led in partnership by a West African and a French organization;
• implemented in the following 13 countries: Benin, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo.

Eligibility

The wearer must:

• be a non-profit legal entity based in West Africa or Europe (EU), such as: farmers’ organisation (FO), West African NGOs, support NGOs active in West Africa or Europe (European Union – EU) insofar as it acts with local partners. Co-operatives are also eligible. Public institutions and local authorities are not eligible as porters;
• Be registered for more than one year.
• have previously carried out actions in the agricultural and food sector.

The partner must:

• be a non-profit legal entity, such as: farmers’ organisation (FO), West African NGOs, support NGOs active in West Africa or Europe (EU) insofar as it acts with local partners, research and/or training organisations. Co-operatives are also eligible as a lead partner. Local authorities can be the main partner provided that their role is decisive and explained in the subsidy application;

PLEASE NOTE: other public institutions are not eligible as “main partners” but can be part of the “other partners” of the initiative.

• be linked to the project leader by a formalised partnership that pre-exists the action for which the subsidy is requested;
• Participated in the definition and implementation of the initiative. Their role and added value must be made explicit. West African partners of European organisations play a leading role in the design and implementation of the proposed initiative.

The CFSI, the Fondation de France or any other public donor cannot have the status of main partner.

Application Process

Please download all the Word and Excel files available below. It is imperative to read the “guidelines” document in which all the instructions are detailed.

The application, completed in French or English, should be sent by email only to the following address: secr.aea@cfsi.asso.fr (Word file, accompanied by the Excel file for the budgets and the requested annexes). The sending will be done in several emails, each of which will have a maximum weight of 8 MB (do not send zipped files). The deadline for receipt of the application by email is Thursday, March 6, 2025.

For more information.