Established in 1974, the AGRHYMET Regional Center is a specialized agency of the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) comprising thirteen countries which are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Chad and Togo. It is an interstate public institution with legal personality and financial autonomy. It has an international status with headquarters in Niamey, Niger.
The main objectives of the AGRHYMET Regional Center are:
- to contribute to food security and increase agricultural production in the CILSS and ECOWAS member countries.
- to help improve the management of natural resources in the Sahel region and West Africa by providing information and training to development actors and their partners in the fields of agro-ecology in the broad sense (agro-climatology, hydrology, plant protection, ...). It is a tool with a regional vocation, specialized in the sciences and techniques applicable to the sectors of the agricultural development, the planning of the rural space and the management of the natural resources
Over the years, the Center AGRHYMET affirmed itself as a regional center of excellence in:
- training of executives from Sahelian countries and elsewhere;
- agrometeorological and hydrological monitoring at the regional level;
- agricultural statistics and crop monitoring;
- regional databases; - management and dissemination of information on the monitoring of natural resources in the Sahel; - documentation on: agrometeorology, plant protection, environmental monitoring, desertification, natural resource management, etc. - maintenance of meteorological instruments and electronic equipment; - Strengthening inter-State cooperation through the exchange of methodology and technologies. It is for this reason that the managers of the Center are more and more solicited by bilateral and multilateral agencies. (USAID, FAO, WHO, IRD, CIRAD, ...) and that it takes part, in connection with CILSS, in international meetings related to food security, sustainable development,
