drought |
Seydou Walaga, a
grey-haired farmer in western Niger, lifts the hatch of his grain silo, a
round hut made of sticks and straw, to reveal piles of sorghum and
millet.
The crops were
harvested nearly seven months ago, the longest a season's yield has ever
lasted him in the drought-prone region of West Africa's Sahel, a
semi-arid belt below the Sahara stretching from Senegal to Chad.
"My family is still
eating the grain I harvested last year," Walaga told the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), which has taught him and
other farmers methods for increasing crop yields.
"In the years before, my crop only fed us for two months," USAID quoted Walaga as saying in a case study.
The main
difference, the farmer said, is a technique he started using called zai,
pits dug in hardened farmland and filled with compost and manure. Seeds
are planted inside at the start of the rainy season, and the pits boost
crop productivity by concentrating scarce water and nutrients around
the plants.
Zai is one of many
techniques experts say have made communities across the Sahel better
prepared to withstand drought since the last major dry spell in 2012
left 18 million people in need of assistance.
Following that
emergency, many relief and development agencies in the region shifted
their focus toward helping people prepare for and survive drought,
rather than only providing aid after each recurring crisis.
Scientists have
also created new ways to collect and distribute climate data, setting up
effective early warning systems for drought.
At the same time,
the Global Alliance for Resilience (AGIR) - set up by the European Union
and regional bodies - has pushed African governments to engage more in
agricultural issues.
But the approach
has been scattered and food insecurity remains high in the region. Many
experts say the next step is to scale up successful programmes to a
national or regional level, requiring more long-term funding and
government support.
AVERTING DISASTER
Scientists say
programmes that track weather patterns are critical for farmers in
Africa where traditional methods of predicting the weather have become
less reliable due to climate change - and are a top candidate for
increased investment.
In Senegal, a
project to provide detailed rainfall forecasts to farmers via radio
programmes made a significant difference during a 2014 drought,
according to Robert Zougmore of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food
Security (CCAFS) programme, which worked on the initiative with
Senegal's meteorological agency.
The service
notified farmers before planting time that the season would be dry, and
advised them to substitute their regular crops with varieties that
required less water.
"It helped to avert a major disaster," Zougmore, CCAFS' West Africa programme leader, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The programme has
since expanded to reach up to 7 million rural people in Senegal, with
similar projects underway in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
While climate
information services are crucial in the Sahel, the interventions that
work best come from the communities themselves and are low-tech,
Zougmore said.
Often the
techniques have been around for decades but farmers need support to
implement them or training to make them more effective and sustainable,
experts say.
For example, in
Chad and Niger, the World Food Programme (WFP) has paid villagers with
cash or food to build dams and dykes, dig zai, and implement other
projects that maximise water resources.
Nearly 1.5 million
acres (607,028 hectares) of dry farmland have been restored in the past
three years, much of it for use by the very poor, said WFP Niger country
director Benoit Thiry.
In parts of Niger, WFP is even beginning to phase out food assistance because people have become self-sufficient, he said.
"We have been able
to measure some improvement in the resilience of the population," Thiry
told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "But there are lots of challenges."
LONG-TERM COMMITMENT
Directors of
international aid and development programmes say they would like to work
with communities over a longer period but struggle to obtain funding to
match.
To create lasting
change requires at least 15 to 20 years of support, said Sibiri Jean
Zoundi, deputy director of an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) platform that oversees West African resilience
network AGIR.
But five years is a
more typical time-frame for programmes such as USAID's Resilience in
the Sahel-Enhanced (RISE) project, launched after the region's
devastating drought in 2012.
Through RISE, USAID
has spread conservation farming techniques and helped communities set
up irrigation systems in especially exposed regions of Burkina Faso and
Niger.
Some of the
agencies with the longest history of working to combat drought in the
Sahel are not international aid agencies but regional organisations such
as the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel
(CILSS), founded in 1973.
CILSS scientist Seydou Traore said drought resilience has been gradually improving since before the 2012 crisis.
Nevertheless there
has been greater national and international attention on resilience to
drought since 2012, according to Zoundi of the AGIR network. "It is too
early to say whether most countries could overcome or prevent a drought,
but they know what needs to be done," Zoundi said.
"We have some very good practices in the region. We just need support to scale them up."
Reporting by Nellie Peyton, Editing by Katie Nguyen.
The Thomson
Reuters Foundation is reporting on resilience as part of its work on
zilient.org, an online platform building a global network of people
interested in resilience, in partnership with the Rockefeller
Foundation.
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