Pastoralist families in Senegal travel north during the rainy season. Peaceful coexistence with the locals is key to reduce tensions around the limited and scarce water resources. ©FAO/Sylvain Cherkaoui
Bousra Ndawène village in Senegal, where Babacar Ndaw lives, comes as a welcome break for the hundreds of pastoralist families and their livestock who pass through the village every day in July.
As convoys of women and children ride in equipment-filled, wooden carts drawn by donkeys and are followed by the men leading herds of cows, sheep and goats, Babacar watches and greets the pastoral community travelling along the 110-kilometre-long and 100-metre-large transhumance corridor that passes through his village. Each year, at the beginning of the rainy season, Senegalese, Gambian, Malian and Mauritanian pastoralists head north to find fresh pastures for their livestock.
Pastoralists in this region travel between 800 and 1,000 kilometres per year.
Babacar’s village relies on this biannual migration. Situated in the Kaffrine district of Senegal, far away from the country’s main cities and roads, the area around Bousra Ndawène has limited crops and scarce water resources, making locals, pastoralists and their herds a great number of mouths to feed. This has at times caused tension between the locals and the nomadic populations.
Through its Investment Centre, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has helped the International Development Association (IDA), part of the World Bank Group, and the Governments of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal to design and implement the Regional Sahel Pastoralism Support Project (PRAPS), coordinated by the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel. The project, a USD 765 million investment in total, has improved access to essential productive assets, services and markets for pastoralists along the main transhumance axes. It is now aiming to improve the resilience of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in the Sahel.
As both a breeder and a farmer, Babacar leads his area’s “Pastoralist Unit”, which is responsible for providing animal health services and information to nomadic pastoralists and local farmers.
Local Pastoralist Units are central to the communities in this area. The whole community participates in choosing leadership and in establishing local plans and charters for governance.
“Each unit has an environmental committee, an animal health committee, an infrastructure committee and focal points for boreholes, stores and markets,” explains Ismael Thiaw, PRAPS project manager for the Koungheul area.
Peaceful management of resources and territories
When Babacar was elected as President of the Pastoralist Unit, he made it his mission to respect the pastoralists’ traditional right to roam the plains of Senegal but also guarantee the locals opportunities to improve their livelihoods while sharing natural resources peacefully.
Having grown up in this community and now raising his children here, Babacar has learnt that peaceful coexistence with nomadic pastoralists requires some effort from each party as well as facilitated access to infrastructure.
The PRAPS project worked to reduce these tensions over resources by providing Boursra Ndawène with major infrastructure investments, like a water point, animal feed storage, a shop and a rehabilitated livestock market.
“Thanks to the new borehole, we now have better access to water. We also now have a store selling close to 50 tons of feed,” explains Babacar.
Besides the infrastructure, PRAPS also helped delineate the north-south corridor travelled by the nomadic pastoralists. Now, bollards mark this transhumance corridor. “This delimitation of land has considerably reduced conflicts,” confirms Babacar.
Animals travelling long distances can carry and spread diseases to large areas. Therefore, animal health services are vital for villages on the pastoralists’ route, like Bousra Ndawène.
The project additionally provided new vaccination pens to improve pastoralists’ access to animal health and reduce the risk of injury for the animals themselves as well as for vaccinations.
Sakhewar Diouf is a young veterinarian, responsible for vaccinating livestock in Bousra Ndawène and surrounding areas.
Travelling the area on his motorbike, Sakhewar brings valuable protection to vulnerable livestock: “We vaccinate the animals, monitor diseases and administer medicine.”
In the context of a growing demand for livestock products in Sub-Saharan Africa, preserving pastoralism in the Sahel is crucial. Compared to 2012, demand for meat in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to rise by 327 percent by 2050.
However, more extreme weather and natural hazards, particularly droughts, are predicted to cause serious harm to the 280 million animals raised by agro-pastoralists in the Sahel region.
Through infrastructure improvements, government support, animal health services and capacity development, the PRAPS investment has so far benefited more than 350,000 pastoralists across Senegal intending to reach more than a million by 2027.
More broadly, across six countries in the Sahel, more than two million pastoralists and agro-pastoralists have already benefited from the project’s activities between 2015 and 2021. 183 veterinary units were established, and 365 vaccination pens were constructed or rehabilitated. 398 waterpoints were made accessible, and 89 markets were constructed or rehabilitated, as well as 39 slaughterhouses, 63 milk collection and processing centres and 23 meat sales outlets.
By the end of 2027, the project aims to reach an additional 12.6 million beneficiaries.
Digital approaches
Accessing information on weather, pasture availability, water resources and payment options in cross-border contexts are some of the biggest challenges faced by pastoralists and the communities that host them.
“We studied how digital solutions, such as mobile money, can help preserve pastoralism,” explains Julien Vallet, Economist at the FAO Investment Centre and project team leader.
“Thanks to the involvement of the United Nations Capital Development Fund, PRAPS has produced a study to support the countries in identifying a sustainable and affordable digital solution to allow cross-border payments for breeders in Niger, Chad and Nigeria, taking into account their needs and the different currencies.”
FAO additionally trained staff members from Senegal’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Livestock to use the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model-interactive tool that estimates the environmental impact of an investment in the livestock sector.
In a few months, the pastoralists will walk through Bousra Ndawène again. The whole community will be there to host them and Babacar will organize their cohabitation. With resources shared by all, the village gets the economic benefits of these visitors and the pastoralists a safe pit-stop in their journey.
Source: The FAO News And Media Office, Rome
