Virtual | Senior Officials Meeting (SOM): Responding to Humanitarian Challenges in a Long-Term Perspective Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger

? 8 September 2020 ? 2.30 PM – 6.30 PM (CEST)
Virtual 

The Danish Government in partnership with the German Government, the European Union, and the United Nations is hosting a high-level humanitarian event on the Central Sahel.

The event will be divided into two separate meetings: a virtual senior officials’ meeting, which will take place on 8 September, and a ministerial roundtable on 20 October. The first part of the event, the virtual senior officials’ meeting (SOM), will focus on operational lessons learned and forward-looking plans for select thematic tracks that cut across humanitarian action, development, and peace efforts, including special attention to the impact and consequences of COVID-19.

The SOM will serve as a technical discussion forum, which will inform the ministerial roundtable in October.

The objectives and outcomes of the SOM will be to:

• Discuss key issues related to the humanitarian, development, and peace context in the region with a view to mobilising humanitarian and complementary development and peace actors around key priority actions in response to the current humanitarian crises. Through this, the SOM will provide detailed inputs to the ministerial roundtable, enabling this to reach its three objectives;
• Discuss challenges and propose solutions as well as investment priorities for the
  humanitarian response, including a focus on strengthening resilience; based in
  particular on findings and recommendations from the workshops for civil society and humanitarian organizations conducted in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali in July 2020; and,
• Provide the elements for strengthened political support, including at national level, for principled humanitarian action, unimpeded humanitarian access to those affected by the crises, and strengthened protection of vulnerable populations affected by conflicts.

Original source: UNOCHA