The Dewral Project

Consortium leader : Catholic Relief Services (CRS) 

Consortium members : Concern Worldwide (Concern) - Caritas Développement Niger (CADEV) - Caritas Mopti - Organisation Catholique pour le Développement et la Solidarité (OCADES Caritas Burkina Faso) 

Countries of implementation : Niger - Burkina Faso - Mali 

Period of implementation : March 2023 / August 2025

Total budget : 8.644.815 GBP

Project summary : After a decade of violent conflict in Liptako-Gourma, what were once temporary displacements are now shifting to longer-term settlements. While shock-responsive short-term assistance is particularly useful in rural, insecure areas, the approach is poorly adapted to serve the significant number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in urban areas who are supported almost entirely by host population generosity. CRS with his partners therefore, proposes an integrated, locally led response “Dewral’s”, offering two types of holistic food security and nutrition packages to meet families’ immediate needs and strengthen household and community resilience to new shocks and longer-term precarity:   

• After a rapid onset shock, Dewral’s short-term (three-months) assistance package will meet vulnerable displaced and host community households’ immediate food, assets, and nutrition needs, as well as provide basic psychosocial support. Leveraging consortium partners’ existing rapid response capacity in each country, Dewral’s will activate this mechanism when coordinating bodies identify an urgent gap in targeted areas. Consortium partners are currently positioned to respond to shocks in Ouallam, Ayorou, Tillabéri, Gothèye and Torodi Departments of Tillabéri Region in Niger; across accessible areas of Sahel, Est, Centre-Nord, and Boucle de Mouhoun Regions of Burkina Faso (and others, given the extensive OCADES network); and in the Mopti, Gourma Rharous (Tombouctou), and Gao Regions of Mali. Specific geographies will be informed by rapid assessments, which evaluate affected communities’ ability to respond, as well as a review of other actors positioned to provide support in the area.  
• Through a series of longer-term (nine-months) interventions in each country, Dewral will support underserved communities experiencing protracted crises with multipurpose cash assistance (MPCA), nutrition, and livelihoods activities to recover food security and resilience and improve child nutrition, as well as work with diverse community members to reinforce social cohesion to address underlying trauma, tension, and exclusion. Dewral’s will conduct a more thorough gap analysis and coordinate with relevant Clusters or Working Groups on an on-going basis, selecting new or underserved displacement sites which did not benefit from assistance under the rapid responses Longer-term activities will likely target: Mouhoun, Sourou, and Kossi (Boucle de Mouhon), Gourma (Est), Kaya (Centre-Nord), and Dori (Sahel) in Burkina Faso; Ouallam, Ayerou, and Torodi (Tillabery) in Niger; and Djenne (Mopti) and Gourma-Rharous (Tombouctou) in Mali.  

Dewral’s integrated response – linking livelihoods support to nutrition and food security activities – will support participants to meet their basic needs and begin looking to the future, while also helping to address the root causes of conflict. Livelihoods assistance will also ease the burden currently on host communities to support IDP families. Because psychosocial factors can enhance or impede impact of both short-term assistance and longer-term resilience, Dewral will support participants to build trauma resilience and manage intercommunity conflict.   

 A key aspect of Dewral’s design is its ability to remain flexible in the face of a constantly changing context. Should security and access deteriorate for a targeted area, CRS, in coordination with SRF, Clusters or Working Groups, and other humanitarian actors, may redirect assistance to different locations as needed.