Yacouba Sawadogo, The African Farmer Who Stopped The Desert

This is how Yacouba Sawadogo, a simple farmer, and his family solved the desertification crisis in his village

Yacouba Sawadogo is known as “the man who stopped the desert”. Born around 1946 in the province of Yatenga in Northern Burkina Faso, and after attending Koranic school in Mali, Sawadogo returned to Yatenga to work as a salesman at a local market. Severe droughts in the region around 1980 marked a turning point in Sawadogo’s life. When agricultural yields dropped and people died from famine, many left the rural areas to find income opportunities in the cities, while Sawadogo did the opposite – moving back from the city to his rural village, determined to find a solution to the crisis.

Sawadogo’s vision was to cultivate the barren land and make it fertile again. The key to Sawadogo’s success laid in experimentation with traditional Zai techniques. Zai is a very simple and low-cost farming technique. Using a shovel or an ax, small holes are dug into the hard ground and filled with compost. Seeds of trees, millet, or sorghum are planted in the compost. The holes catch water during the rainy season, so they are able to retain moisture and nutrients during the dry season.

He eventually creating a 40 ha forest on what four decades ago was barren and degraded land that no one wanted to farm. The forest now has more than 60 species of trees and bushes as well as a variety of wildlife and is arguably one of the most diverse forests created and managed by a farmer in the Sahel.

The technique he utilizes, Zai, has also spread to neighboring Mali, and he teaches it to the many people who come to learn from him. “I want to design a training program that will be the starting point for many fruitful exchanges across the region and there are so many farmers from neighboring villages that visit me for advice on good quality seeds to plant,” Sawadogo says. “I’ve chosen not to keep my farming methods as secrets to myself”.

Today, Sawadogo is facing serious problems for several quarters. Northern Burkina Faso has become increasingly volatile due to incursions by jihadist groups and inter-communal conflict, which have brought insurgent attacks and social unrest. An expansion project in the area has taken up a considerable portion of the forest he spent years growing: homes have been built on his land, with little compensation being offered. In addition, the entire family is on guard to protect the area from people wanting to steal wood.

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