Survival in the Sahel

the process. Hopefully, this new assessment of their role will
continue to hold true.
7.5 The struggle against the desert
All Sahelian countries have programs to check the advance
of desertification. Many of these programs are carried out under
the supervision of the Comit6 Permanent Inter-etats de Lutte
contre la S~cheresse dans le Sahel (CILSS-Permanent Interstate
Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel). CILSS has published
a report on 21 of these projects, many of them at the village level.
Some of these case studies describe in detail the role of women in
efforts to combat desertification. 1 0 4 Observations made in the
course of these projects are confirmed by many other reports from
development cooperation projects. Highly motivated women actually
perform work that men were initially shown how to do.
Often, however, women do not gain any immediate benefit
from their considerable additional workload. In Burkina Faso, for
instance, women, not men, worked hard carrying rocks and water
for the construction of dikes to protect fields that belonged to men.
It appears that when women are equally well trained for work as
men, the effectiveness of the technology being applied is enhanced.
Women are proud of their work and may even overlook
the fact that they will not be allowed to till the land that they
helped to rehabilitate.
It was reported from a project in Niger, where small dams
were used to reclaim cropland, that th, reclaimed land would be
allotted to families who carried out the construction and the
planting. In many cases families had women to do the work. i
the end, the land did not go to them, but to the (male) head of the
family. There were a few exceptional cases where women, as
heads of the household, participated in the project in their own
name. But most of the women, who did most of the work, were
rewarded with a community orchard and a vegetable field. Now,
women ask what happens in the case of divorce and wonder
whether their efforts have provided them with any rights.
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