Yacouba Sawadogo

Who was Yacouba Sawadogo?

Yacouba Sawadogo was a farmer who grew a forest where nothing grew any more. In Gourga, a village near Ouahigouya in the Yatenga province of northern Burkina Faso, he turned crusted, barren ground into a wooded landscape over four decades, with a hoe, manure and an old technique that he made better. He passed on what he learned freely, to anyone who came to see it. He became known far beyond the Sahel as the man who stopped the desert.

His story is not one of a lonely hero. It is the story of a farmer who began with what was already known in his region, improved it through his own observation, and then made sure that others could do the same.

His life

Sawadogo was born in 1946 in Gourga, in what was then French West Africa. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the Sahel suffered severe drought. Harvests failed, many families left the land, and the soil of the plateau formed a hard crust on which rain simply ran off. In 1979, in the middle of this crisis, he began to experiment.

He was not met with applause. According to the Right Livelihood Foundation, people in his surroundings called him a madman for breaking with the customary way of digging the pits. His forest was even set on fire. He carried on. He died on 3 December 2023, aged 77, in a hospital in Ouahigouya.

The idea

The zaï pit is an old practice of the Sahel: a small planting hole dug into hard ground, in which water and nutrients collect for a single plant. Sawadogo did not invent it, and he never claimed to. What he did was to develop it further. He dug the pits earlier, in the dry season before the rains, and made them wider and deeper. He filled them with manure and compost. The organic matter attracted termites, whose tunnels broke up the crusted soil so that water could soak in deeper. According to the Boston Globe, which reprinted the New York Times obituary, his improved pits tripled his millet harvest.

He combined the pits with stone lines along the contour, low walls of loose stones that slow the runoff and hold back soil, related to the dry stone walls of the Mediterranean. And he let trees grow. Seeds in the manure germinated in the pits; he protected the seedlings and added tree seeds himself. Millet, sorghum and maize grew between young trees, and year by year the field became a forest. Bigger pits for bigger trees, a small dam for water, troughs for animals and beehives completed the picture, as the Right Livelihood Foundation describes.

In his own words, recorded by the foundation: "This project is for future generations."

The work

His main work is the forest of Gourga. Chris Reij and colleagues described it in 2009 as a forest of about twelve hectares. Because it kept growing over the following years and the sources count differently, later figures are higher: Tree Aid speaks of 27 hectares, the Right Livelihood Foundation of almost 40 hectares with more than 60 species of trees and shrubs. Where he once found bare ground, there is now shade and a layer of fallen leaves.

His second work is the passing on of knowledge. From 1984 he held market days on his land, twice a year, shortly after the harvest and just before the rains. Farmers from more than 100 villages came to exchange seed, tools and experience. He also gave training to young men and women. In this way, as Kaboré and Reij describe in their study of 2004, the improved zaï spread from farmer to farmer across the region.

The documentary The Man Who Stopped the Desert (2010) by Mark Dodd carried his story around the world.

What became of it

The improved zaï is today one of the best-known examples of farmer-led land restoration. Together with stone lines, it helped rehabilitate large areas on the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso; according to the Right Livelihood Foundation, the work of Sawadogo and the farmers he trained contributed to restoring tens of thousands of hectares in Burkina Faso and Niger. The foundation's figure is an estimate, not a measurement series.

Recognition came late, but it came. In 2013 the UN Convention to Combat Desertification named him one of its first Dryland Champions. In 2018 he received the Right Livelihood Award for turning barren land into forest and demonstrating how farmers can regenerate their soil. In 2020 the UN Environment Programme named him a Champion of the Earth in the category Inspiration and Action.

What we learn from Yacouba Sawadogo

Terra Humana takes from Yacouba Sawadogo the conviction that the turnaround of degraded land does not have to come from outside. It can grow from the knowledge of a place and the patience of the people who farm it. He did not wait for a perfect technique; he improved the one he had.

We also take his order of things. On hard ground, water and organic matter are brought together first, exactly where a plant is to take root; the trees follow. For the slopes of Sa Medada we draw from this the idea of preparing planting pits in the dry season, filling them with compost, covering them with mulch and slowing the water with stone lines, in the same spirit as the half-moon. And we take his generosity. Knowledge that is shared multiplies. That a forest grew from the seeds in the manure is a lesson in how regreening and fertility return together.