The Sahel is getting greener everyday

When visiting the Sahel desert during a road trip from Ouagadougou, Burkina faso, I noticed that the Sahel is looking greener than I had imagined. Even at the end of the dry period in May, trees carried green leaves and some bushes even flowered. I wondered what the Sahel would look like in three months time, after the rain season.

I was travelling with a group of Burkina NTIC, the national network for advocacy, lobbying, knowledge sharing and awareness raising on the use of ICT for development that is supported by IICD. My IICD colleague Miep, who is supporting the network, and I were invited by the network to come along on a Road Trip to Bokin in the North Central of Burkina Faso. In Bokin the network was planning to visit several communities to explain and show how beneficiary the use of ICT can be.

Bokin, a place about 100 kilometres up north of Ouagadougou in the Sahel, is the administrative seat of the department of Bokin, an area covering about 50 square kilometres with over 50,000 people. Life expectancies are low and facilities are scarce. Most people are living completely isolated, struggling to produce enough food to feed their own families. In dry season temperature rises up to 45 degrees Celsius which makes life even more unbearable. Red dust is covering everything.

In this area resides Sahel Solidarité, partner of IICD and member of Burkina NTIC, which is working in the area of water sanitation and hygiene. An important part of their work is informing local communities about how they can prevent diseases and illnesses by taking care of their personal hygiene (e.g. washing hands before dinner) and organised places for washing and cooking. In their work they make use of multi-media to show good and bad examples of hygiene.

Together with them we visited several communities in the department of Bokin. One of the stops was in Bokin itself where we met health care prevention workers and local officials. Sahel Solidarité showed them how ICT could help to make people more aware of dangerous health situations by using digital cameras to register ‘good and ‘bad’ hygienic situations which were shown on a large screen in the evenings in different communities. How effective using multi-media is for their work we could see with our own eyes later that evening. Just a few kilometres outside of Bokin Sahel Solidarité had set up a film screen made out of two poles and a white sheet on which they projected images. People living in villages nearby were invited to attend this presentation. It was pitch black and for me it would have been impossible to find my way, but around 8 pm we saw lights glowing up in the dark, coming closer and closer, announcing the arrival of many a person on bike. From far and near they had come. They were impressed with what they saw. Perhaps it was just the magic of a ‘son et lumière’ show outdoors, but the pictures showed them what simple measures they could take to avoid risks of infection. Amazing how a simple presentation of pictures can make a difference, especially for people in areas like Bokin, who have difficulties with reading and writing.

More striking though was our visit to the community of Pourra where a local entrepreneur had started to broadcast news and information on water hygiene, vaccination programmes and other relevant activities in the area. He had been inspired by the work of Sahel Solidarité to start using radio to improve the information to and communication with local people. People could even call during the programme to ask questions or announce something. The radio station resided in his shop, but in the midst of the dust, dryness and immense heat that what was done in that small building made all the difference to the people. Having access to information and being able to communicate, to ask questions about how and when, gave people the opportunity to change something for their own good.

For the first time I witnessed what information and communication can do to people living in isolated areas like the Sahel. Like the first green leaf on the emergence of spring, it gave them hope. Hope and trust in the fact that something would change, that they could do something. The Sahel is getting greener day by day.