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Sawadogo, Yacouba
Yacouba Sawadogo (b. 1946, Gourga, French West Africa [today in Yatenga Province, Burkina Faso] - d. December 3, 2023, Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso) was a Burkinabé farmer and agronomist who successfully used a traditional farming technique called zai to restore soils damaged by desertification and drought. Such techniques are known by the collective terms agroforestry and farmer-managed natural regeneration.
A 2010 documentary feature film, The Man Who Stopped the Desert, first screened in the United Kingdom, portrays his life.
Sawadogo was a native speaker of Mossi. In 2018, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for turning barren land into forest and demonstrating how farmers can regenerate their soil with innovative use of indigenous and local knowledge." In 2020, he was awarded the Champions of the Earth award.
Sawadogo died on December 3, 2023, in Ouahigouya, Burkina Faso.
The northern portions of Burkina Faso fall in the Sahel Belt, a semi-arid region between the Sahara Desert to the north and tropical savannas further south. The region periodically suffers from drought. The most recent major drought occurred from 1972 to 1984, resulting in a famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
One effect of the drought was widespread desertification. Combined with other factors such as overgazing, poor land management, and overpopulation, the drought led to a substantial increase in barren land, particularly on slopes, due to the comparative difficulty of cultivating sloping land. Uncultivated, the soil experienced increased erosion and compaction. Such practices also led to an annual one-meter reduction in the water table in the 1980s.
Together with Mathieu Ouedraogo, another local farm innovator, Sawadogo began experimenting with techniques for rehabilitating damaged soil in the 1970s. He relied on simple approaches traditional to the region: cordons pierreux and zai holes. Both Sawadogo and Ouedraogo engaged in extension and outreach efforts to spread their techniques throughout the region.
Cordons pierreux ("stony cordons") are thin lines of fist-sized stones laid across fields whose purpose is to form a catchment. When rain falls, it pushes silt across the surface of the field, which then fetches up against the cordons. Slowing down the flow of water gives it more time to soak into the earth. The accumulated silt also provides a comparatively fertile spot for seeds of local plants to sprout. The plants slow the water even further in and their roots break up the compacted soil, thereby making it easier for more water to soak in.
Zai holes take a slightly different approach to catch water. They are holes dug in the soil. Traditionally, they were used in a limited way to restore barren land. Sawadogo introduced the innovation of filling them with manure and other biodegradable waste in order to provide a source of nutrients for plant life. The manure attracts termites, whose tunnels help break up the soil further. He also increased the size of the holes slightly over the traditional models. Zai holes have been used to help cultivate trees, sorghum, and millet.
From the mid-1980s until 2009, the use of zai has also led to the water table levels rising by about 5 meters (16 feet) on average, and as much as 17 meters (56 feet) in some areas.
To promote these methods, particularly zai holes, Sawadogo held twice yearly "Market Days" at his farm in the village of Gourga. Attendees from over a hundred regional villages came to share seed samples, swap tips, and learn from one another.
The process was supported by the Dutch scientist Chris Reij of the World Resources Institute and OXFAM UK.
Over more than two decades, Sawadogo's work with zai holes allowed him to create a forested area of 62 acres (250,000 m2), which has led both to a struggle with the government regarding ownership and right to the land, as well as a later protection measure from the government. The forested area is clearly visible on satellite images east of the hospital and is called Bangr-Raaga in Mossi, which means Forest of Wisdom. Subsequently, this area was annexed by the nearby city of Ouahigouya under the auspices of a government program to increase city revenues. Under the provisions of the program, Sawadogo and his immediate family members were each entitled to one tenth of 1 acre (400 m2) out of the plot and did not receive any other compensation.
In 2008, Sawadogo was attempting to raise US$20,000 to purchase the land. The following year, he was attempting to raise €100,000 because land was now valued at €100,000 from his increased work to fertilizing the lands.
In 2012, settlers reached the edge of the wood and began erecting the first buildings in the forest in 2019. The authorities reported about an ongoing administrative procedure to protect the land as municipal heritage.
A protective fence for the whole forest was inaugurated on June 18, 2021, in the presence of Burkina Faso's Minister of Environment.
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Yacouba Sawadogo, African Farmer Who Held Back the Desert, Dies at 77
Against the odds, facing the encroaching Sahara, he built a forest in Burkina Faso, becoming “a national hero” and winning acclaim abroad for his innovations.
Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known as “the man who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing agricultural methods and creating a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African country. He was 77.
His death, in a hospital after a long illness, was confirmed by his son Loukmane Sawadogo.
Mr. Sawadogo, a lean, taciturn man who never learned to read or write, received a hero’s welcome when he returned home to landlocked Burkina Faso in 2018 after winning the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, created in 1980 to honor social and environmental activists. A throng greeted him at the airport in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital, and he was received by the country’s president.
Years before, fellow villagers in his arid, windswept country in the north had called him a madman for implementing a simple improvement to an age-old water-conservation technique. But Mr. Sawadogo had the last laugh: Forestry experts said the forest he created, with more than 60 species of trees and shrubs, had no equal in the Sahel, the semidesert region stretching across Africa’s upper third.
The Sahara’s encroachment, abetted by decades of indiscriminate tree-cutting and now by climate change, with decreased rainfall, is a major threat to an already fragile region. Large swaths of land have been stripped of trees, from the Gulf of Guinea right up to the desert.
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By the end of his life, Mr. Sawadogo was recognized as one of the few who had successfully pushed back. Farmers using his techniques have more than tripled their grain yields, in an area where agriculture must depend on sparse rain. Burkina Faso, the world’s 22nd-poorest country, has an average life expectancy of under 63.
Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer and a senior fellow of the World Resources Institute in Washington, said in a phone interview that Mr. Sawadogo “single-handedly has had more impact on soil and water conservation than all the experts combined.” He added: “He managed to build a forest out of nothing, a forest of 30 hectares with the largest biodiversity in the Sahel. At the end, he became a sort of national hero.”
Mr. Sawadogo won the United Nations Champions of the Earth award in 2020. Luc Gnacadja, a former head of the U.N.’s anti-desertification program, said in an interview from bordering Benin: “He was exceptional. A whole zone that had been desertified was transformed.”
Mr. Gnacadja invited Mr. Sawadogo to be the keynote speaker for a high-level conference in Switzerland. “He explained, in all humility, what he had done,” he said, “and he left us a legacy that shows that degradation of ecosystems is not inevitable.”
Mr. Sawadogo had an almost mystical relationship to the trees he brought into being — the marula, the acacia, the gum arabic, the desert date tree — treating them “like humans,” his cousin Arouna Sawadogo said in an interview from Burkina Faso. When arsonists, jealous of Mr. Sawadogo’s success, torched his forest several times in the 2000s, Arouna Sawadogo said, he was “an old man with a sad face; he stayed in the ashes for several days.”
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But he always bounced back, telling his son Loukmane, one of his 27 children by three wives, “Even if I have a little bit of force left, even for one minute, if there is a tree to plant, I will do it.”
It took years of hardship — drought, famine and shifting political winds in a country where strongmen rulers alternate through coups d’état — for Mr. Sawadogo to effect his transformation from suspect outsider to figure of respect, sought after by farmers throughout the Sahel for his counsel.
“Some people just do whatever they want with our forests,” Mr. Sawadogo said in a 2010 film about him, “The Man Who Stopped the Desert,” by the British producer and director Mark Dodd. “When you are serious and start work that others don’t appreciate, then they treat you as a madman.”
He recalled: “People wouldn’t even speak to me. They said I was a crazy man.”
Mr. Sawadogo’s heresy revolved around transforming the practice of what local farmers called zai — digging small pits to capture precious rainwater. These farmers typically waited until the start of the rainy season, at the beginning of summer, to dig the zai.
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But Mr. Sawadogo began well before, when the earth was bone-dry. And he dug the pits wider and deeper. He put manure and rocks in the bottom of them. He made use of termites to help break up the land. The manure contained seeds. When the rain came, the rocks helped retain the water, and the water turned the seeds into seedlings, which he nurtured. The soil would stay moist for several weeks after the rainfall.
“The results were striking; the soil improved along with his crop yield,” the U.N. said in announcing his award. “He was able to grow trees in the arid ground.”
Mr. Sawadogo eventually helped the process along, planting trees himself. Trees protected crops from the wind.
“As soon as I understood how important trees were, I set to work on planting the forest,” he said in the film. Mr. Reij of the World Resources Institute said, “For him the trees became more important than the grains.”
Yacouba Sawadogo was born on Jan. 1, 1946, in Gourga, a village about 110 miles north of Ouagadougou, to Adama Sawadogo, a farmer, and Fatimata Bilem. When he was very young his parents sent him to a Quranic school in Mali, where, he recalled in the film, the leader of the school told him he was destined for great things.
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When he returned home as a teenager, he opened a stall selling motorcycle parts in the market in Ouahigouya, the provincial capital. It was successful, enabling him to put aside money. But, he later told interviewers, he was restless and yearned to return to the land. Stacking the odds against him was the looming drought that devastated the Sahel from the mid-1970s, when he left the market, to the mid-1980s.
Rainfall decreased by 30 percent. Whole villages were abandoned because farmers were no longer able to feed their families. “It was a bit of an environmental disaster,” Mr. Reij said. It became urgent to conserve what little rainfall there was, and to use it productively. Mr. Sawadogo began experimenting.
The improved zai — he put millet seeds in the pits as well — led to a tripling of his grain yield, allowing him to feed his family for three years, he told one interviewer in 2011.
By the 1990s, researchers as well as farmers were coming to study his methods; Niger alone sent 13 farmers. Fame for Mr. Sawadogo and trips abroad followed. He participated in a United Nations conference on climate change and testified before congressional staffers in Washington.
“He was a bit like the trees he wanted to protect, simple and accessible,” Luc Damiba, a honey producer and film festival director in Burkina Faso, said in an interview.
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After the last fire, at the urging of Burkina citizens, the government built a fence around Mr. Sawadogo’s forest, Mr. Reij said.
In addition to his son Loukmane, Mr. Sawadogo’s survivors include his three wives, Safiata, Khaddar Su and Raqueta, and his 26 other children.
“He managed to find resources to stand up to drought,” Mr. Gnacadja said. “That’s called adaptation.”
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