"Based on a French initiative, AMMA was built by an international scientific group and is currently funded by a large number of agencies, especially from France, UK, US and Africa. It has been the beneficiary of a major financial contribution from the European Community's Sixth Framework Research Programme."

AMMA has 3 main goals:

1. to improve our inderstanding of the West African Monsoon and its influence on the physical, chemical and biological environment, regionally and globally;
2. to provide the underpinning science that relates variability of the WAM to issues of health, water resources, food security and demography for West African nations and defining and implementing relavent monitoring and prediction strategies;
3. to ensure that the multidisciplinary research carried out in AMMA is effectively integrated with prediction and decision making activity.