Regional Humanitarian Pooled Fund for West and Central Africa

A woman displays her aid card after receiving relief supplies from humanitarian partners. Mali, floods
A woman displays her aid card after receiving relief supplies from humanitarian partners. Photo: OCHA/Ramatoulaye Moussa Mazou

The Regional Humanitarian Pooled Fund for West and Central Africa (RHFWCA) was established in June 2021 as the first-ever Regionally hosted Pooled Fund managed by OCHA through its Regional Office for West and Central Africa. In 2024, the RHFWCA has country envelopes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.  

The core mandate of the RHFWCA is to allocate funding to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity based on humanitarian needs and identified priorities while adopting and promoting a coherent transnational approach to regional emergencies and humanitarian issues. The Fund prioritizes actions that have strategic and catalytic effects on the humanitarian response in the region, promoting synergies between country envelopes and remaining dynamic, flexible, and agile in the fluid environment and changing circumstances on the ground.  

The RHFWCA is a flexible funding mechanism supporting local/national and international NGOs, to respond to the most pressing or critical emergencies in the Sahel region. Under the leadership of the Humanitarian Coordinators (HC) in each country where the funding tool operates, the RHFWCA supports the timely allocations and disbursements of donor resources to the most critical humanitarian needs defined in the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP). 

The humanitarian crisis in the Sahel is worsening. In 2024, some 17 million people in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger need humanitarian assistance and protection. In recent months, there has been an increase in the number of displaced persons to around 5 million as the region continues to face a series of complex and interconnected challenges such as drought, flooding, violence linked to struggles for control over natural resources, insecurity arising from extremism, and forced population displacement “making the vulnerable even more vulnerable,” particularly for women and girls. 

In each country where the RHFWCA operates, the HC is supported by an Advisory Board (AB), which comprises of representatives from donors, local/national NGOs, international NGOs, and UN agencies to ensure the decisions reflect insights from across the humanitarian community. 

 The Fund is operationally managed by OCHA’s Regional Humanitarian Financing Unit based in Dakar, Senegal, in close collaboration with each OCHA Country Office where the funding tool operates, which ensures that the RHFWCA is rooted and connected to the epicenter of the crisis with allocation processes and monitoring close to partners and projects on the ground.

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