In the Sahel, where protracted crises, fragility and geopolitical uncertainty have become defining features of the regional environment, the central problem facing international assistance may not simply be how much money is available, but how that money is organised.
A new policy brief from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, argues that donors need to move beyond institutional silos and finance collective outcomes instead. Its central message is direct: humanitarian, development and peacebuilding programmes cannot achieve lasting resilience if they operate alongside one another without sufficient coordination.
The brief, Partnering for Social Cohesion in the Sahel: Lessons for Donors, published in September 2026 by Simone Bunse and Caroline Delgado, draws on SIPRI’s research into the Sahel Resilience Partnership, an initiative supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ. The research for the publication was financed by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ GmbH.
The partnership brings together GIZ, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Food Programme across Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. Its focus is the peace component of an integrated, multi-agency and multisectoral humanitarian-development-peace, or HDP, initiative.
For donors, the implications are significant. The SIPRI brief argues that the conventional separation between humanitarian assistance, development and peacebuilding can undermine the very resilience those interventions are intended to create. Instead, funding should encourage complementary efforts built around shared objectives.
The Sahel Resilience Partnership offers one operational example of how this can work. Its programmes combine food and nutrition security, climate-resilient ecosystem restoration, access to social services, local conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Rather than treating these areas as independent interventions, the partnership seeks to connect them around collective outcomes.
SIPRI argues that this approach requires a fundamental change in how programmes are designed and financed. Donors should fund the governance mechanisms needed to make multi-agency cooperation function, rather than assuming coordination will happen automatically.
The partnership’s multilevel governance structure is presented as one of its strongest features. Regional strategic coordination, country-level management and flexibility in local implementation are combined in a single framework. Such arrangements can help reconcile differences in institutional mandates, timelines and organisational cultures while connecting regional, national and local knowledge.
But coordination at higher levels does not necessarily translate into cooperation where programmes actually operate.
Agencies may align their strategies at regional or national level while remaining fragmented on the ground because they work with different budgets, reporting cycles and procurement systems. SIPRI therefore calls for greater geographic and programmatic convergence, with donors structuring funding to encourage agencies to align their activities in the same places and around shared objectives.
That could include joint data collection, shared data systems and, where feasible, joint field presence.
The distinction matters because local communities experience the combined effects of humanitarian need, weak services, insecurity, environmental pressures and governance challenges rather than encountering them as separate institutional categories. SIPRI’s argument is that assistance should therefore be designed with that reality in mind.
At the centre of the approach is social cohesion.
The Sahel Resilience Partnership defines cohesion through trust, solidarity, equal opportunity and improved relations between citizens and the state. SIPRI distinguishes between horizontal cohesion, involving trust across individuals, communities and identity groups, and vertical cohesion, involving trust between citizens and authorities.
The policy brief argues that these objectives should not be confined to programmes labelled as peacebuilding. Social cohesion can also be incorporated into education, water and sanitation, health, social protection, food security, natural resource management and local governance.
That means development interventions themselves can become part of peacebuilding when they are designed with explicit cohesion objectives and links to broader peacebuilding efforts.
For donors, however, this requires a different funding model.
SIPRI recommends multiyear funding windows because trust-building takes time. It also calls for flexible financing that allows partners to adjust activities when insecurity increases or access becomes restricted. Partnerships between organisations with complementary humanitarian, development and peacebuilding mandates should be prioritised when they operate in the same geographic areas.
The brief also recommends allowing an inception phase in which partners can clarify their respective roles and establish the basis for cooperation. Donors should require evidence of programme convergence, strategic complementarity and joint field missions at local level, while rewarding conflict-sensitive delivery models that deliberately strengthen both horizontal and vertical cohesion.
Shared evidence is another essential component.
SIPRI recommends joint data sharing, common learning systems and embedded research partnerships. The logic is that applied research should not sit outside programme implementation but become part of it, enabling organisations to learn from evidence and continuously adapt their interventions.
This approach reflects a broader priority within Germany’s 2026 development policy. BMZ has reaffirmed peace, stability, integrated security and support for the United Nations system as core priorities. At a time of constrained fiscal space, Germany has also emphasised evidence-based policymaking as an overarching principle for effectiveness and sustainability. The Sahel is one of BMZ’s four focus regions.
The evidence partnership between SIPRI and GIZ was created against this backdrop to generate policy-relevant learning at the intersection of research and implementation. The objective is not simply to document what happens, but to use evidence, structured learning and policy dialogue to improve how programmes adapt.
For donors assessing future nexus funding, SIPRI proposes a series of practical questions: where and at what level will organisations converge geographically and programmatically; how will local interventions actually be integrated; what systems will enable shared data and joint learning; how will political shocks and access disruptions be incorporated into contingency planning; and how will social cohesion outcomes be planned, achieved and measured jointly over time?
These questions point towards a different definition of success.
Rather than judging individual projects primarily by their separate outputs, SIPRI argues that donors should increasingly consider whether their financing produces collective resilience: stronger resources, capacities, institutions and systems, improved legitimacy of services and more trusted social relations.
The distinction is crucial in an environment where emergency responses can become recurrent rather than transitional. SIPRI’s conclusion is that financing complementarity, joint programming, geographic convergence, flexible time horizons and shared evidence systems could allow the HDP nexus to move beyond rhetoric and become a more practical model for resilience.
The Sahel Resilience Partnership does not represent the only possible way to operationalise the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. But SIPRI presents it as an example of how donors can shift the emphasis from disconnected projects towards collective outcomes.
In a region where instability and crisis place constant pressure on limited resources, the policy brief makes a case for changing not only what donors finance, but how they finance it.
Its underlying proposition is that resilience cannot be assembled from isolated interventions. It depends on the capacity of institutions, the legitimacy of services, the strength of local systems and, ultimately, the trust binding communities and authorities together.
For SIPRI, that is where the potential peace dividend lies: not simply in providing another emergency response, but in building the capacities and relationships that could reduce dependence on recurrent emergency aid.
