Community-based natural resource management - International ...

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In 1988 IFAD funded a ten-year programme of soil and water conservation to reintroduce
simple, replicable conservation practices. This was IFAD’s first major natural resources
management programme that addressed land-degradation issues in relation to poverty and
drought. In the beginning there were implementation problems. Government staff had no
experience with the proposed, simple technologies and wanted to continue the usual
practices, even though these had failed in the past. However, in 1989 a study visit to
Burkina Faso by 13 farmers, including four women, was the catalyst of a major change.
The group visited the Yatenga region of Burkina Faso and made two discoveries.
The first was that farmers carried out their own soil and water conservation without the
need for incentives such as ‘food-for-work’. The second was that planting pits used
extensively and successfully in Yatenga to rehabilitate degraded land (known in that region
as zai), looked very much like their own traditional planting pits used in the past (and
known in the Tohoua region as tassa).
‘Tools-for-work’ not ‘food-for-work’
In Burkina Faso, there were no incentives such as food-for-work to encourage farmers
to undertake soil and water conservation work. In Niger, the situation was quite
different. A long tradition existed of offering gifts or incentives to farmers involved in
bund construction and other conservation measures. The IFAD programme broke with
this tradition and adopted a policy of providing food-for-work only in drought years,
when harvests failed. At other times, conservation efforts were rewarded with new
community infrastructure such as classrooms for the school or a village well. This new
approach to incentives required careful explanation, but villagers gradually accepted it.
Zai reminded farmers of tassa
The zai pits in Yatenga were a low-cost (some US$8 per hectare), low-maintenance
method of conserving water in the field in small hand-dug pits, some 20-30 cm in
diameter, 15-20 cm deep and 8 metres apart. The removed earth was placed on the
downstream side of the pit to form a small ridge and thus retain more water. The
bottoms of the holes were covered with manure to provide nutrients and enhance water
infiltration and retention. When it rained, the holes filled up with water and farmers
planted millet or sorghum in them.
On returning home, some of the farmers decided to revive tassa. They rehabilitated
4 hectares of land, including one field next to a main road so that people traveling by
would see the impact. The results were so impressive that the following year tassa use
increased to 70 hectares. This was a drought year and only those farmers using tassa
got a reasonable harvest. Over the next few years, tassa was instrumental in bringing a
total of 4,000 hectares back into production. In surveys, farmer cited several reasons
for this rapid uptake: doubling of yields, rehabilitation of barren land, easy maintenance
and easy weeding and thinning.