Coping with unreliable water availability

Farmers in semi-arid West Africa understand the value of water, how it limits crop production and how essential it is to survival. They must contend with unreliable rainfall, short, unpredictable rainy seasons, and increasingly frequent natural hazards. Moreover, climate change may exacerbate all three. To sustain their livelihoods, farmers need good strategies for capturing and conserving rainfall and making the best use of it.

There is no shortage of good ideas for conserving soil and water in West Africa. Researchers have developed many simple and useful technologies to optimize rainfed agriculture, but farmers have tended not to adopt them on a significant scale. For various reasons, farmers’ problems and researchers’ solutions have not connected. However, one idea is making a good connection. Farmers are reviving and adopting tassa, a traditional soil and water conservation practice, at a surprising rate in the Niger. Why is tassa special and what has made it successful?

Facilitating cross-regional learning and promoting a simple, locally-owned technology

In the Niger

The Tahoua region of the Niger is a typical drought-prone area. It is hilly, with fertile valleys, alternating with badly degraded plateaux. In the past, the valley bottoms were flooded regularly, bringing in fertile sediment. However, droughts have led to a loss of vegetation on the valley slopes, and water now runs off rapidly, causing gully erosion on the slopes and damage to fields downstream.

Since the 1960s, several projects had intervened to protect the valley slopes and plateaux, but without much success.

They tended to use methods unfamiliar to local farmers and ignored traditional techniques, even though the remnants of old conservation practices were still evident.

In 1988 IFAD funded a ten-year programme of soil and water conservation to reintroduce simple, replicable conservation practices. This was the first major IFAD 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 4 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 (and known in that region as zai), looked very much like their own traditional planting pits used in the past (known in the Tahoua region as tassa).

In Burkina Faso, there were no incentives such as food-for-work to encourage farmers to undertake soil and water conservation. In the 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.

The zai pits in Yatenga were a method of conserving water in small hand-dug pits, some 20-30 cm in diameter, 15-20 cm deep and 0.4-1.0 m apart. The removed earth was placed on the downstream side of the pit to form a small ridge and so retain more water. The pit bottoms were covered with manure to provide nutrients and improve water infiltration and retention. When it rained, the holes filled with water and farmers planted millet or sorghum in them. Zai pits take 50-60 working days per hectare to construct and about ten working days per hectare to maintain, depending on the soil and rainfall. They need redigging every one-to-three years.

On returning home, some of the farmers decided to revive tassa. They rehabilitated 4 hectares (ha) of land, including one field next to a main road so that people travelling by would see the impact. The results were so impressive that the following year tassa use increased to 70 ha. 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 ha 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.

Tassa revived

Today tassa is again an integral part of the local farming scene. The technique has spread at a surprising rate, adding an additional 2-3 ha per year to some holdings. It has even spawned a new industry of young day labourers, who have mastered the technique. Rather than migrating to find work, they tour the villages, working for local farmers.

Interestingly, the initial programme appraisal mission did not list tassa as an option to promote among farmers. Contour stone bunds and demi-lunes were preferred – more expensive forms of in-field soil and water conservation promoted by researchers. These are also useful techniques and some farmers adopted them, but not to the same extent as tassa.

The extension workers promoting tassa were also able to provide tools and training. However, most farmers did not wait and went ahead on their own. It seems they learned more by looking over the fence and copying techniques from other farmers.

Tassa may not be rocket science, but it has already contributed to mitigating agricultural risk and improving household food security for many impoverished families in the Niger. The technique is now being promoted beyond Yatenga in Burkina Faso and is being introduced in Cape Verde.

Why it succeeds

Three key factors have contributed to the success of tassa:

• An action-research approach that identified and assessed local practices, facilitated cross-regional learning, encouraged farmers to watch what their neighbours were doing, let farmers choose without added incentives and supported them in fine-tuning their preferred options.
  
• A simple, cheap, traditional technology that produced immediate results, could be integrated into existing cropping systems, and was easily replicated using local labour.
• A technology that could be adapted to suit the changing local context.