In its support to its Member States and in partnership at the regional level with the RBM, IOM has developed an Early Alert System at the micro-local level, engaging local authorities, relevant line ministries and herders’ representatives to pre-empt potential conflicts linked with transhumance movements across several countries in West and Central Africa. IOM also works closely with the Liptako Gourma Authority (ALG), composed of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali's States, to identify and discuss risks and vulnerabilities in the tri-state zone, and in turn, has built working relationships with representatives of the three governments alongside national herders’ associations and local authorities representing local community perspectives and the international community.  

IOM participates in the Ministerial Sessions of the High-Level Regional Consultation for Peaceful Transboundary Transhumance organized by ECOWAS and RBM for the Central Corridor that convenes the relevant Ministers of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Togo. The Organization will continue to coordinate with these actors to ensure complementarity and information-sharing, in an effort to promote multilateralism given the regional scale of the herders’ movements and to reduce conflict associated with ungoverned transhumance. With an established presence across all countries of the Central Transhumance Corridor, IOM extends its support to its Member States on data collection and on localised conflict mitigation approaches through coordination with representatives of relevant line ministries and, where established, representatives of the National Transhumance Committees (CNT). 

This Crisis Response Plan will target Senegal, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic which all face challenges associated with transhumance.

IOM currently implements its two-pronged transhumance cross-border conflict mitigation strategy, which leverages institutional expertise in data collection and localised approaches for community stabilisation activities, rolling out IOM’s Early Alert System (the Transhumance Tracking Tool - TTT), mobilizing all local stakeholders to address and prevent conflicts between herders and farmers while providing the means for tangible/structural solutions.    

IOM’s global expertise in data collection through the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) methodology, and its various tools, are of relevance to this strategy. Based on this methodology and in coordination with the regional pastoralist network RBM in West and Central Africa, IOM has developed a set of dedicated tools to monitor movements at the scale of a region, map the status of routes and pastoral infrastructures and an Early Alert system at the micro-level to inform, in real-time, the relevant local actors about the arrival of problematic herds in sensitive locations. The TTT tools seek to enhance the capacity of the regional network to prevent conflict associated with premature transhumance through lands that have yet to be harvested. IOM is, therefore, able to benefit from this existing partnership with RBM, and from its demonstrated institutional experience in rapidly identifying and training enumerators on adapted methodologies to respond to the needs of various population movements. IOM also benefits from its global and regional expertise in community stabilization programming to enhance communities' support and engagement with local authorities, endemic conflict mitigation structures and mechanisms through improved participatory decision-making processes for collective mutual benefit.