The women 'bulldozers' of Niger’s desert

“Less than five years ago nothing grew on these plateaus,” Aicha Bouda tells us. This 48-year-old woman is helping her grandchildren collect ripe beans. Their field was restored following rehabilitation works to improve the degraded land in this part of North-Eastern Niger.

For more than a decade this part of Niger has symbolised the courage, determination and commitment of women. They make up 90% of the workforce at the sites where dams and anti-erosion dykes are being erected and stone bundles laid to harvest water and reduce wind damage. Under the scorching sun they collect and transport the stones across several hundred metres. Many of their husbands have fled the famine and the drought for neighbouring countries, Ivory Coast in particular.

Years of work to render hospitable the degraded land

For this region lying 600 kilometres to the northeast of Niamey, Niger’s capital, it all began in 1984 with the Keita project, a rural development programme financed principally by Italian cooperation and implemented by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with the support of the local communities. The programme was launched following the drought and famine that hit the Sahel (the geographical region in Africa between the Sahara desert in the North and the savannahs in the south) in the 1980s.

Between 1984 and 2000 an FCFA (Franc de la Communauté Financière Africaine - Franc of the African Financial Community) budget of 30 billion was administered in three stages with the aim of reclaiming degraded land, rehabilitating the environment and stabilising a population forced to make an annual exodus due to food shortages.

At the end of the programme, in 2000, the inhabitants of the Keita region continued the work with the support of the Agricultural Development Ministry under a special programme set up by Mamadou Tandja, Niger’s former President. 

These women have earned the nickname ‘bulldozers’ for the way they revolutionised thinking and changed work practices. “In the past, heavy work was reserved for men. But over time we have shown that women can do it too,” says Hassana Salifou, a 38-year-old woman who has worked on a number of sites.

More than 25,000 hectares of this sterile land have been reclaimed and used for cultivation, with 16 million trees planted, most of them fodder plants. These are a considerable vital resource for the region’s inhabitants and especially the livestock farmers. The reclaimed land is ceded free of charge to the women. Land that is made commercially available after being reclaimed and rehabilitated triples in price. “Some men who have returned from the exodus after an absence of several years want to take the land from us,” complains Fatchima Ibrahim, a woman who grows sorghum on a reclaimed plot. 
These plantations also help to combat the greenhouse effect as they make it possible to trap in the soil about 132,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO²) a year, according to the data provided by the Keita integrated project.

Hegel Goutier