Burkina Faso

The ICP III has an indica­tive fund­ing enve­lope of EUR 95.5 mil­lion and focus­es on the sec­tors of (i)
sus­tain­able man­age­ment of nat­ur­al resources, (ii) edu­ca­tion, teach­ing and tech­ni­cal and voca­tion­al train­ing, and (iii) infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies (ICT). The bilat­er­al inter­ven­tions in these fields are imple­ment­ed by LuxDev, Luxembourg’s devel­op­ment coop­er­a­tion agency. In addi­tion, for the 2016 – 2022 peri­od the NGO SOS FaimLux­em­bourg has been giv­en a remit to act in the area of rur­al microfinance.

The ICP III makes pro­vi­sion for part­ner­ship com­mit­tees to be held annu­al­ly. These are forums ded­i­cat­ed to dia­logue between the two coun­tries, which also facil­i­tate the exam­i­na­tion of the state of play in devel­op­ment coop­er­a­tion inter­ven­tions. In view of the health cri­sis, the 12^th part­ner­ship com­mit­tee was held on 20 July 2020 by video-con­fer­ence, co-chaired by Min­is­ter Fay­ot and his coun­ter­part in Burk­i­na Faso, Min­is­ter Kaboré. Despite the adverse impacts of the health and secu­ri­ty cri­sis, as a whole the imple­men­ta­tion of the ICP III pro­grammes was judged to be satisfactory.

As the part­ner­ship com­mit­tee was tak­ing place, Min­is­ter Fay­ot also announced a bud­get increase of EUR 5.5 mil­lion for the sup­port pro­gramme for imple­men­ta­tion of the Sec­toral Plan for Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing. This addi­tion­al sup­port echoes the role of lead tech­ni­cal and finan­cial part­ner in the edu­ca­tion sec­tor that Lux­em­bourg will take on in 2021 and will hold until 2022.

Also, fol­low­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty study car­ried out in 2019 with a view to pos­si­ble sup­port for Burk­i­na Faso’s tax reg­is­ter, Min­is­ter Fay­ot con­firmed that this sup­port would amount to EUR 1.5 mil­lion, which opens up a new area of inter­ven­tion by Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion in Burk­i­na Faso.

Final­ly, the part­ner­ship com­mit­tee dis­cussed the launch of the mid-term review of the ICP III (2017−2021), which start­ed at the end of 2020.

Mul­ti­lat­er­al­ly, in 2020 Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion con­tin­ued its sup­port in the areas of local gov­er­nance and youth entre­pre­neur­ship through a project imple­ment­ed by the Unit­ed Nations Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP). Two oth­er mul­ti­lat­er­al stake­hold­ers also con­tin­ued to ben­e­fit from Luxembourg’s finan­cial sup­port in 2020. These were the Unit­ed Nations Pop­u­la­tion Fund (UNF­PA) through a project to increase the inde­pen­dence and repro­duc­tive health of women and vul­ner­a­ble young peo­ple and the Unit­ed Nations Cap­i­tal Devel­op­ment Fund (UNCDF) which has deliv­ered sup­port for inno­va­tion in the area of inclu­sive dig­i­tal finance in order to sup­port the eco­nom­ic and cli­mate resilience of pop­u­la­tions. This lat­ter ele­ment is receiv­ing finan­cial assis­tance of EUR 3.2 mil­lion from the Min­istry of the Envi­ron­ment, Cli­mate and Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment (MECSD) for the 2019 – 2022 period.

Final­ly, in 2020, 14 Lux­em­bour­gish NGOs were active in Burk­i­na Faso, and con­tin­ued to imple­ment their projects despite the health crisis.