The Sahel region is a zone stretching across the African continent from the Cape Verde Islands and Mauritania to Sudan. The region is synonymous with desertification, drought and harsh living conditions. Man-induced changes to vegetation from overgrazing and intensive use of wood for cooking and heating are being supplemented by global climatic change that will put even more pressure on this extremely vulnerable habitat.

CILSS
The Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (Francophone abbreviation CILSS, see websites) was created on 12th September 1973 as an intergovernmental organisation of nine Sahelian countries. The current mandate consists of 'seeking to assure food security and to combat the effects of drought and desertification for a new Sahelian ecological balance'. In organisational terms CILSS is comprised of three branches: the Executive Secretariat based in Ouagadougou, capital of the Republic of Burkina Faso, the Sahel Institute, a specialised institute, based at P.O. Box 1530 in Bamako, capital of the Republic of Mali, and an AGRHYMET Regional Centre (ARC). The last is a specialised institute based in Niamey, capital of the Republic of Niger and provides the special focus of this article.

AGRHYMET Regional Centre
The AGRHYMET Regional Centre is a specialised institute of CILSS and an interstate public body with legal status and financial autonomy and carrying international status. It was created in 1974 in the wake of the drought that had hit the Sudano-Sahelian zone of West Africa since 1969 and resulted in human and ecological disasters in 1972 and 1973. Originally, the Regional Centre was geared towards training in agro-meteorology and operational hydrology and their applications. The restructuring of CILSS in 1993 resulted in the creation of two major programmes: Information and Training and a Management Centre.

Information Requirements
The mission for AGRHYMET is the collecting, processing, analysing and managing of biophysical and socio-economic data, while at the same time producing and disseminating information on food security, natural resource management, desertification control and the environment. The resulting objectives are to sensitise and regularly and pertinently inform populations, decision-makers and other stakeholders such as national authorities, development partners and so on, to encourage more rational decision making on issues relating to food security, natural resource management and the environment in the Sahel. In conformity with this mission the ARC organisation constitutes of three operational units: the Food Security Unit, the Methods and Applications Unit and the Natural Resource Management Unit.

Food Security Unit
The duties of this unit include the collection and management of biophysical and agro-socio-economic data and the exploitation of ground-truth and satellite data for crop prediction, early warning (drought, and the often occurring huge, both in terms of geographical spread and individual size) plagues of pests such as locusts. Warning and advice is also provided to farmers and producers, involving the following activities:

• analysis and processing of biophysical information using, among others, satellite, airborne and agro-socio-economic data
  
• monitoring cropping season and vulnerable populations
  
• analysis and information dissemination regarding food security through early-warning bulletins intended for decision-makers and advice to farmers and producers.