Documenting livelihood trajectories in the context of development interventions in northern Burkina Faso

Abstract

The northern Central Plateau of Burkina Faso has been the site of extensive development assistance since the 1980s. Thousands of hectares of degraded land have been rehabilitated through investments in Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) techniques. Comprehensive assessments of these projects have documented their beneficial impacts. This study extends these insights to consider the effects of SWC on livelihood sustainability by comparing recent household-level indicators with studies conducted twenty years earlier. Comparing quantitative data from two different points in time allows researchers to identify 'livelihood trajectories', or the general direction of either improvement or decline. The results show that although SWC investments have improved the natural capital of Mossi households, improvements in other forms of capital have accrued mostly among wealthy households.Key words: Livelihoods, development, Mossi, Burkina Faso

Perceived benefits, constraints and determinants of sustainable intensification of mixed crop and livestock systems in the Sahelian zone of Burkina Faso

“…Fifty households were randomly sampled from four villages in each site from village census lists, representing between 5% and 10% of the total number of household in each village, to characterize intensification practices for crop and livestock systems, constraints and opportunities for intensification of the systems and the perceived benefits of intensification. A household in our study context consists of all members who work together in a field, pool resources, share meals and recognize the authority of a single head (West, 2013). Data collection took place in May and June 2016, administered in French and in local languages where necessary (Fulfulde in Seno province and Moore in Yatenga province) by trained enumerators at the respondent's homestead.…”

Famines are a Thing of the Past: Food Security Trends in Northern Burkina Faso

“…These soil and water conservation (SWC) measures consist of contour stone bunds (popularly called “ diguettes ”), semi-permeable dikes, and zaï pockets, which are shallow pits with low dirt berms in which farmers plant cereal crops with small amounts of compost. These SWC techniques have been enormously successful (Reij, Tappan and Belemvire 2005; West 2013) and may be contributing to the enhanced greening signal (Herrmann, Anyamba and Tucker 2005). They have increased cereal yields by 40 to 100 percent in fields treated with SWC compared to those that are not (Reij, Tappan and Smale 2009: 56).…”

Land grabs, farmworkers, and rural livelihoods in West Africa: some silences in the food sovereignty discourse

“…There are instances when family farm heads and other household members sell off their labour supply to other farms to supplement family income needs for social and economic purposes. Such incidences usually arise from challenging livelihood contexts related to land degradation (West, 2018), and under unfavourable rural agricultural policy environments (Scoones, 2015;Windfuhr & Jonsén, 2005), as well as the impacts of colonial legacies. As rightly indicated by Bernstein (2010), colonial trends of commodification began with the introduction of cash crops and the forced commercialization of crops, a means of consumption and production which made wage labour supply necessary.…”