Press Release

FAO and KSrelief to scale up cooperation on humanitarian work, data-driven development

17 November 2021

Rome – The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSrelief) announced an ambitious new five-year Strategic Joint Cooperation Agreement with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Tuesday. The agreement commits the partners to scale up joint action to meet humanitarian needs, address drivers of acute food security, and help at-risk agricultural communities build resilience to shocks that undermine their productive potential.

Caption: Abdullah Al Rabeeah, Supervisor General KSRelief, and FAO Director-General QU Dongyu at the signing ceremony of the Joint Cooperation Programme (JCP) between King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief) and FAO.

Photo: © FAO 2021

The agreement also outlines efforts to improve knowledge sharing on agricultural best practices, engage in data-driven development work via FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Initiative, and advance agricultural innovation to help small-scale food producers achieve better production and build better lives.

It was signed at FAO’s Rome headquarters on Tuesday by FAO Director-General QU Dongyu and KSrelief’s Supervisor-General, Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Rabeeah.

The Director-General said: “We are looking forward to strengthen our partnership in the humanitarian arena, but also in the area of data and knowledge for development, including work under FAO’s innovative Hand-in-Initiative, which is opening up new opportunities for vulnerable agricultural communities in the Near East and North Africa region and beyond. Working together, we can make a huge difference in the lives of rural communities pushed to the brink by crises.”

Al Rabeeah stated that the signing of the two agreements represents the expanding partnership between KSrelief and FAO to help many people in need as well as help communities develop to be more resilient and thereby become more self-dependent.

Saudi Arabia and FAO have been long standing partners and with the establishment of KSrelief the relation has become much closer and expanded to enter into capacity building, exchange of information and to look into global issues to improve life quality and safer environment.

Al Rabeeah concluded that KSrelief is happy to see this relationship become a model to be followed for helping communities and countries in need.

Helping farming families in Yemen

As a first step under the new expanded partnership, KSrelief today contributed $5 million to improve the food security and nutrition of Yemen’s most vulnerable smallholder farmers.

The $5 million will fund an FAO project assisting more than 24 000 highly vulnerable smallholder farming families comprised of 168,000 people. It will provide them with high quality vegetable seeds, tools and irrigation kits, and animal feed and mineral blocks, while also offering them training on nutrition-sensitive agriculture to help them improve their diets.

Since its founding in 2015, KSrelief has provided approximately $33 million in support to FAO emergency and resilience interventions. KSrelief has been FAO’s largest humanitarian resource partner among the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in addressing food insecurity and malnutrition and reaching people most in need.