Document(s) 33 of 39

In many West African cultures, education and cultural norms do not encourage women to speak out in public. Yet, women constitute around 53 per cent of the population and 80 per cent of them live in the countryside. They account for 90 per cent of agricultural labour and they do most of the transporting and processing of farm and forestry products. Prohibited from speaking out in their communities, women are thus denied the right to participate in decisions about the management of natural resources, of which they are the primary users. The Union of Rural Women of West Africa and Chad (UFROAT) decided to tackle the situation in a new way by enlisting women from six countries¹ to participate in drawing up an action plan:

My name is Sali Fofana. I come from Dafinso, a little village in western Burkina Faso. My daily life revolves around the search for water, which takes longer and longer to find. Our village has only two pumps for 1800 people. One of the pumps has broken down, and so we have to spend half the day lining up in the heat of the sun to get our supply of water. For us, water means life, as you will hear people say in the Sahel. We have to find enough for our people and our animals. I am so overwhelmed that I have to send my daughter out for water. That means she does not attend school regularly, and she's not doing very well in her class work; but what can I do? Not only that, but the marsh has been dry since January. It's as if nature herself has abandoned us to our fate.

Sali Fofana is not a real person; but what she describes is very real for millions of African women who feel directly the impact that environmental collapse is having on their living conditions. Her words could be those of any of these women. They sum up the experience that a great many rural women have related in the course of an initiative to make their voices heard in decisions about natural resource management policy in their region.

With the accelerating disappearance of vegetation cover from countries of the Sahel, not only is water becoming scarcer, but people have to travel ever greater distances for the firewood that is their chief source of domestic fuel. The situation falls heaviest upon women such as Sali Fofana, whose stories often go something like this:

In the past, when I needed wood for the kitchen, all I had to do was go into the field next to the house. Today, wood is scarce and I have to go a lot further to find it, or I have to buy it. Since this is now a lucrative business and the distances are great, it's the men, with their trucks and carts, who go out for the wood and then they sell it at ever steeper prices.

It was no surprise that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro emphasized the role of women in preserving a viable and stable environment, while stressing the need to reduce extreme poverty, which is closely linked to environmental degradation.

Given their key role, rural women should be a great asset in developing natural resource management policies. This was precisely the objective of an initiative to enlist rural women from six West African countries in drawing up an action plan for natural resource management in a process that was participatory from beginning to end. With the implementation of that plan, they would, in turn, become a force for pressure and a source for ideas concerning national and regional policies. Moreover, the process sought to demonstrate that participatory communication and, in particular, the exchange and sharing of knowledge can help rural women to analyse the problems they face and seek solutions by drawing upon the knowledge, experience and resources that they possess.

Methodology

The initiative has involved two stages to date. Initially, workshops were organized in each of the countries to help the women prepare the materials that would be used in the action plan. The second stage was to formulate the plan. In 2005, there was a third stage, which saw a regional workshop where women from the six participating countries validated the plan.

In methodological terms, the workshops were designed to let the women express themselves by defining and analysing their own situation and coming up with their own solutions that will take their specific circumstances into account. Talking is the main tool in these workshops. The initiative also exhibited the following characteristics.

Recognizing the diversity of rural women's concerns about ecology and farming

Although the degradation of natural resources is a generalized phenomenon, its severity and the constraints that it generates vary from one agro-ecological zone to the next. In order to reflect this diversity of problems, representatives were selected from every agro-ecological zone in each country, and were invited to express themselves in their own language.

Facilitating information on key concepts

These workshops employed two key concepts: natural resource management and action research. Experts from the environment and natural resource ministries and resource persons in different fields were asked to contribute to these workshops. After listening to all the viewpoints expressed by the women, they offered some explanations on these questions and on the national policies to which they related.

The organizers had to draw heavily on their experience in order to achieve the workshops' objectives, given the women's low level of education.

Participatory diagnosis of constraints in each zone

The women were divided into groups according to their home region. Focusing on the three components of natural resources (land, vegetation and water), each group described and analysed the status of natural resources in each agro-economic zone, as well as the role of women in resource management and the difficulties that they encountered in performing that role. Next, the groups compiled an inventory of possible solutions and the needs facing women under each of these components.

Interaction among the groups

The working groups reported their results to the plenary sessions, where the women debated both the difficulties they faced in common and those specific to certain zones. They then discussed and prioritized the activities to be included in the action plan.

Field visits

Visits were arranged to meet with women's associations working in the field of natural resource management. This brought the participants into contact with other women's associations engaged in activities similar to their own. The visits provided the opportunity for very useful exchanges between participants in the programme and the associations visited. They also laid the basis for an ongoing relationship among women from different agro-ecological zones.

Some eloquent stories

Throughout the process, participants discussed the impact of gender inequality on rural women's lives and on their efforts to preserve natural resources. The story recounted by Sali Fofana provided eloquent testimony of how working and living conditions for female farmers have deteriorated over the years:

My field is barely half a hectare. It's a long way from the village and from my husband's field. It's an old field and it's not very productive. I have to get up at the crack of dawn so I can get my own fieldwork done before I have to go and work on my husband's field. I have no one to help me and I don't have any modern tools or inputs, such as a plough or mineral fertilizers, and so I put a lot of hard work into my field for a very meagre return. This year, for example, I harvested only two bushels of peanuts. Of course, I also grew some okra, some sorrel and some eggplants to perk up the family diet.

A few years ago, like all the women in my group, I learned how to produce organic fertilizer. But I don't make any use of it; if I enrich my field I'm afraid it will be taken away from me. It's the chief who gave me my field. In our village, women don't have the right to own land. This means they can't plant trees on the lands that are given to them, nor can they take any major steps to protect the soil.

I like to gather shea nuts and seeds from the locust tree [néré] to use in the kitchen and to earn a little money on the side. Nobody grows these things. You find them in the fields and in the bush. Today the bush is steadily retreating and it's becoming harder to find these fruits. We can no longer get any soumbala [a kind of mustard from the néré, used for seasoning] or shea butter, and now we have to buy our shea nuts and locust seeds from the men. This is really serious because we're not allowed to go into the fields to gather them. Since these wild fruits are worth money, the men keep the harvesting of them to themselves. People are so greedy that they will even take fruits before they are mature and then they use chemicals to speed up the ripening, something that can be hazardous to your health.

The local organization as a talk forum

Yet, despite all these difficulties and setbacks, women are not giving up. In some cases, their resolve has led to the creation of groups that are now the main forums for sharing information and talking about their daily lives. These groups have produced leaders who are now invited to represent them nationally and internationally, as was the case with this initiative. As Sali Fofana puts it, things unfold as follows:

As you can see, I'm tied up with problems. But thank God I'm a fighter. So I got the women in my village to group together to try to resolve our problems. After all, we want a bit of happiness too. My village sisters asked me to head up the group. They chose me because I get along well with everyone, I lived abroad in Ivory Coast and I went to school as far as the intermediate level.

In the invitation letter, I was asked to organize a meeting with the women and the men to discuss the status of the environment in our village and to talk about the place and role of women. This was important because we have to consider all points of view if we are to take decisions that will help the whole village. If we, women, just got together alone to analyse things, that would be all very well; but the men might feel left out and they could put roadblocks in the way of our project. As it is now, they are our allies.

Kaya: Women and experts

Following this local initiative, a national workshop was held in each of the six countries, bringing together women from several regions. In Burkina, participants met at Kaya, north of the capital. This workshop was intended to pool the women's experiences and observations and wrap them up into a coherent action plan. For Sali Fofana, as for all the rural women who took part, the opportunity to express the viewpoint of her village and to compare notes with the other women was an invaluable experience. And when their knowledge and their observations were validated by experts in various disciplines, this served to reinforce the women's perception of the importance of their role within their communities. For all the Sali Fofanas who had invested time and effort in the process, this was a moment of great pride:

The great day had arrived; I was off to Kaya. There, I met women from the four corners of Burkina. Each of us spoke about her village, about rainfall patterns and their impact on the bush, on water, on people and on animals. Each of us talked, as well, about her role as a woman in exploiting and managing the bush, the water and the land. We realized that a woman's situation is just about the same all over the country. There were natural resource management experts present and they gave us some new information that we used to analyse the situation in depth. They admitted that what we were saying was right on the mark. Like other countries in the Sahel, Burkina has been suffering a prolonged drought since 1969 and rainfall has dropped sharply. This has had a severe impact on vegetation, on soils and on farming systems, leading to an explosion in the area under cultivation and a drop in fertility and in the availability of water. While national guidelines set a standard of one water point for every 500 people, the real figure in the countryside can be multiplied by five or six times, and around 57 per cent of households get their water from undrinkable sources.

We found some solutions and we proposed some actions. Take the fruits that we use for our condiments, for example. We said that men and women have to work together, within the home and in the village, to appreciate the usefulness of these fruits in feeding the family and to enforce village regulations that used to prohibit people from taking the fruits too early. The authorities used to decree a specific day when everyone could go out and gather the fruits. We waited until they were ripe and no one could take them before. That regulation has to be brought back into force in the village. Then everyone will have a little, and that will prevent the fruits from being gathered when they are still green and unusable.

We want to be involved in selecting the species for reforestation. Since the locust and the shea don't yield as much anymore, we need to plant more of them, as well as fruit trees that we women can use to feed and care for our family and to earn a little money. We hear that shea butter brings a lot of money today because the Europeans like it and they buy a great deal of it. We women know how to produce the butter, we are trained, and we can look after the trees and make a high-quality product that will bring even more money.

The locust tree produces soumbala, a spice that every woman knows how to prepare and that gives a good taste to our sauces. Since the locust no longer does well, soumbala is expensive. It is being displaced by the Maggi cube, which is widely advertised. People say that's why so many people are dragging along with high blood pressure. We want to bring back our native plants that allow us to eat and to earn a little money.

When it comes to water, we have asked to be involved in selecting well sites and to be given some decision-making positions on the water point management committees. We're also going to demand more water points in the villages so that water will be more readily accessible.

As to the women's fields, we want the ones they give us as our personal plots to be as close as possible to the family field, and we want to be able to use our husbands' tools and materials to cultivate our fields. We also want to see discussion in the village about the importance of the women's fields in terms of family food security. More and more, our families depend on the produce from our fields to tide them over until the next harvest. We have problems in producing the compost that the extension workers have taught us to make, and sometimes we have to steal it and put it on our fields. If we had more compost, we could cultivate our plots more intensively and produce more food. With all the solutions proposed, we discussed their feasibility and we selected the best ones.

Lessons learned from the experiment

Involve the women in data gathering

To promote community participation, the women were asked to do some advance preparation before the workshops whenever they could. In some cases, this preparation involved the entire community, while in others it was limited to the women's associations in their specific configurations. These discussions within the community not only served to inform the community about the important role that women play, but sensitized people to the problems women face in carrying out their tasks. The results formed the basis for activities in the workshop groups.

Have participants analyse the data

The approach used was shown to be very effective because it respected the ability of rural women to define their place and their role, as well as the constraints they face in managing natural resources. In their analysis, they took into account the pattern of distribution of household tasks while stressing the need for dialogue between men and women in order to re-establish a degree of balance and equity. They identified their needs very clearly in terms of natural resource management, and they put forward solutions that took account of the whole community.

The methodological approach

Allowing rural women to speak and appreciating the value of their knowledge can instil confidence in this social group, which suffers daily from injustice and inequalities, and can encourage them in constructing a vision of society.

The right to speak is very important in the life of every person, of every social group and of society as a whole. It lets individuals or groups express what they are, what they experience and what they feel. It also allows them to affirm what they know, what they can do, what they think and what they want. But, above all, speaking allows individuals or groups to organize themselves in order to improve the situation or achieve the goal by entering into communication with other people or other groups to enrich the social debate. Finally, speaking allows traditionally marginalized individuals or groups to participate in taking more relevant and equitable decisions for sustainable development.

In short, speaking is a fundamental human right. Yet, given the balance of forces within societies, this right is denied to some people, particularly women.

Despite the real progress that has been made during recent years, the overwhelming majority of rural women in West Africa still have no voice. Yet, when they are given the opportunity, they can define and analyse better than anyone the situations that affect them, provided that the facilitator respects their pace and gives free rein to their capacities for imagination and expression. The right to speak must mean the right to express oneself; but it also means listening and communicating, for it is through communication that new visions are constructed. Thus, if rural women express themselves and compare their views with those of other groups (through dialogue, exchange of knowledge and study visits), they will be able to decide the best actions to take as a group to secure sustainable development for their communities. At first, they will talk mainly about 'practical needs'; but they will very quickly move on to 'strategic interests' (transforming unequal relations between men and women, or between rich and poor). When they talk about the actions they want to take to meet their needs, women always demonstrate a concern to discuss them with the men and with their communities. In the end, most of the actions they select are things that they can do either by themselves or in conjunction with the partners working with them.

Problems encountered

The approach taken in the workshops in the six countries, while empowering, was beset by problems relating to the limitations, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that are imposed on women.

The diversity of languages

In some of the workshops, there were nearly as many languages as participants, and we had to find local facilitators who could serve as interpreters. Apart from Mali, where nearly all of the women in the workshop spoke Bambara, proceedings had to be conducted in at least three languages. It took a lot of work to prepare the interpreters to give translations that would respect all the subtleties. It was very frustrating to have a woman recount her experiences in her own tongue and with great emotion, and then to hear a translation that would render not half the story and nothing of the emotion. We can imagine that rural women have the same feeling when debates are conducted in French, and when they have to wait for the translation in order to understand proceedings and offer their own viewpoint.

Moreover, the time it takes to go through this exercise can discourage participants, who would rather engage directly with the audience.

Socio-cultural constraints

By tradition, women do not participate in the discussion of community problems. They do not express their views in public, unless they are mandated to do so by a group. Most of the women attending the workshops, even those representing associations, were unaccustomed to speaking publicly and their lack of experience made them uneasy about expressing themselves spontaneously.

In fact, given the social division of labour, the many domestic tasks that fall to women leave them little time to attend meetings. Thus, they never acquire the habit of participating or of speaking in front of men.

Religion (or its interpretation)

Because of their religion, some women are not allowed to frequent places where men are present. Their daily life is cloistered and they take little part in associations of the kind that allow women to open up and let down their guard. Those who get the chance to attend workshops of this kind often have trouble expressing their viewpoints clearly.

Women's illiteracy

The fact that most rural women are illiterate is an enormous constraint on their ability to interact with others. Among the group (from six countries), only perhaps one woman in four could read and write (either in French or in her native tongue). Despite the effort to provide illiterate adults with audiovisual tools to help them receive and exchange information, we must recognize that the rural world remains largely cut off from the exchanges of information that are essential to thinking about development.

Lack of education

Analysing a situation or problem requires capacities for assessment, reflection and reference to other experience or knowledge. Because they are confined in their environment and have no access to information that might deepen their understanding, rural women have trouble analysing a problem in depth, identifying all its causes and ranking them in order to find all the possible solutions. Their analysis, however relevant it may be, is limited. They jump too readily from a problem to the solution without appreciating all the underlying causes. Rural women need to broaden their horizons and interact with other people.

Some results from the workshops

During the national workshops, the women analysed the natural resource situation in their communities, listed their concerns and their needs relating to natural resources, and identified the main actions required to meet those needs.

The women's analysis of their situation showed that, to varying degrees, natural resources in all their countries are deteriorating at an unprecedented pace that threatens people's very survival. This sparks competition that throws into conflict the various components of a given community, or of two or more communities who share these resources. It is most often the weakest members of the community who are excluded from managing these resources, and women fall in this category.

These workshops also revealed the women's awareness that improving the conditions under which they work is a prerequisite to any solutions for preserving natural resources. They want to change their relationship with their communities through dialogue so that their family members and friends will appreciate their contribution differently. Despite differences from one agro-ecological zone to another, some common features stand out clearly, such as the need to overcome inequalities of access to land and property rights. Land, water and vegetation are at the very centre of women's lives, and they will be the first to try to preserve those assets if they are given the means.

Participants in this initiative wanted to produce an action plan that would be an instrument for reinforcing their capacities to analyse, to compare and to propose solutions so that they could constitute a critical mass for reversing current trends. In the end, they wanted to develop collective strength so that they could negotiate and influence decision-makers in order to change their own living conditions and those of their communities.

A first outline of the action plan became available in September 2004. To turn this into a real tool for members of the UFROAT rural women's associations, it will now have to be validated. A regional workshop with all the delegates from the six countries should serve to deepen the analysis and confirm or reject some of the proposed strategies.

By way of conclusion, we may say that overcoming the many obstacles that prevent rural women from speaking out means establishing a framework and conditions within which women can affirm themselves and their contribution to society, where they can broaden their horizons and encourage society's awareness of the importance of seeking and listening to their views and taking them into consideration at all levels of debate and decision-making bodies.

In a sense, facilitating dialogue among rural women, with other members of their communities and with development players, means unleashing at least 50 per cent of the region's potential energy and putting it to work for development.

Note

¹ These six countries comprised Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Togo and Chad.

Document(s) 33 of 39