Summary
- Project: Web Alliance for Re-greening in Africa (W4RA)
- Summary: Train and coordinate local developers to create and maintain Web-based platforms to help local farmers and others in the agricultural ecosystem in the African Sahel to share local innovations for growing vegetation in very harsh environments.
- Partners: Web Foundation, Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam (VU W4RA page), Africa Regreening Initiative.
- Status: Starting in 2010 (with Workshop on Mobile Web for Rural Development in Burkina Faso 3-4 February), and running through 2012.
- Funding: Secured for 3 years of initial work in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali. Additional funding is desired to expand this work to other areas, even other continents.
The Story
Challenge/Opportunity:
In the 1980s several periods of drought had severely deteriorated living conditions in many of the rural communities in West Africa. However, a number of innovative farmers in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, developed simple but effective techniques, and rehabilitated a large area of degraded land.
They did so both with and without external support.
Now, 25 years later, farmers in Niger have protected and managed on-farm trees and created cultivated parklands where few trees grew before. In Niger and Burkina Faso, about half a million hectares of barren and crusted land have been converted into fertile fields with crops and trees through the arduous work of a number of farmers. These trees and crops feed an additional 3 million people. In particular in regions with dense populations, the environmental decline has been reversed. This has also led to a reduction in rural poverty.
These results, based on a new agricultural grassroots techniques, are impressive. Yacouba Sawadogo is one farmer who has developed such techniques (see the video preview of a documentary that 1080 Films is completing on Yacouba, titled: The Man Who Stopped the Desert). The impact of techniques like those employed by Yacouba could be greatly magnified. Indeed these new techniques are not yet widespread among communities that are living in similar areas in Sahel, not to mention other countries with similar conditions. The problem is that communication up to now has been mainly by face-to-face exchanges, including busing of farmers to observe successful innovators. What is we could employ a “digital bus” to expand information sharing?