Christiane Kahrmann
Participatory methods in which the affected populations have a say in designing and implementing development projects are very much in fashion these days. But it is not always easy to practise these methods, as the following case study shows.
"This is how the landscape here must have looked in earlier times." Stefan Sellen, of the KfW, points out a small forest with dense undergrowth near Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. A small watering place, surrounded by sturdy, shadowing trees, can be seen in the background. Directly next to this idyllic scene begins a barren wasteland. Here and there one can still find dried-up shrubs and the stumps of trees. The fields between the villages lack water. The strong, dust-laden harmattan from the Sahara swirls the red sand into the air. That is what the Sahel region looks like today.
One quickly associates this desolate landscape with disastrous droughts and famine. The dreadful pictures of starving people during the Sahel drought of 1973 spring to mind. One also recalls the North's last-minute aid measures, without which the people here could not have survived.
Two questions arise. How did this development come about? And can the inhabitants of the Sahel survive without external aid? True, the desertification of the Sahel was caused by nature. But human beings have spurred the problem by over-cultivation and over-grazing of the land.
Causes of desertification
On Burkina Faso's heavily-populated Mossi plateau, the local people say the development began with the clearing of the forests for firewood. Hardly a tree has been left standing in the countryside around Ouagadougou. The rural folk cut them down not only for their own needs, but also to supply townspeople with firewood. The second stage began with the laying out of fields on the cleared land in order to feed the growing population and give the farmers income from cash crops. But in the meantime these fields also have disappeared. The pressure to exploit them meant the farmers could no longer allow them their earlier usually long fallow periods. The result was erosion.
The soil is now so worn-out that nothing grows in it. There is not only a lack of rainwater; the groundwater table has also sunk due to the over-use of the land. The Mossi, Burkina Faso's largest ethnic group, suffer from hunger on average every three years, especially when they carry out rain-fed farming. This was found by a survey among Mossi farmers by the Special Research Division of the University of Frankfurt.
Under these conditions, is it still possible to secure the feeding of the population there in the long-term? Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaoré said proudly during a visit by the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, CarlDieter Spranger last March: "Desertification and drought are our daily lot. Burkina Faso was already settled in the tenth century. There were also times of drought in those days. Our wealth is poverty. We have few resources, no forests, no water. That is why we are compelled to organize ourselvesandworkfasterand betterthan richer countries. Burkina's riches are the work its people perform." And after all, he added, there was such a thing as solidarity among Africans. But the country's education and public health systems had to be improved. Compaoré appealed to the international donor community to support Burkina in its efforts to develop these sectors. Finally, he remarked: "We have maintained our dignity amid our poverty."
Survival with external aid
Compaoré's words were those of a politician. They come across as somewhat unrealistic, for the President certainly does not suffer from poverty. But they express well the African view of the problem, that even if they are very poor they can proudly have their own views on development and show solidarity. The poor can improve their living conditions by joint work.
But Compaoré's point on the necessity of aid is realistic, for the drought problem in Burkina is now more complex than it was in the 10th century. African solidarity, if such really still functions, is no longer sufficient to solve it. Burkina's population is currently growing by 2.8 per cent a year. The soil must feed ever more people. As Compaoré rightly put it, the population growth can be reduced only by improving the education and health of the people, especially the women. There is now a great need for expert advice on controlling erosion and protecting resources. Methods must be developed which on the one hand secure food for the constantly growing population, but on the other do not contribute to further soil erosion.
Only with the support of the international donor community does Burkina Faso, which can be translated as the Land of the Upright People, possibly have a chance to improve the lot of its population. More than 200 development organisations currently active there. The public budget is financed mostly by development assistance. Despite that, the country has so far not allowed foreign development concepts to be thrust upon it without further ado.
Sankara: empowerment from above
Compaoré's predecessor, Thomas Sankara, toppled and killed in 1987, was the first to develop a national desertification control policy. His immediate objectives were to protect resources and improve agro-production, but his overall goal was to empower the poverty-stricken rural population. He took a hard line in pursuing these aims. Besides large-scale afforestation projects for firewood production, he attempted to protect his country's resources by penalising uncontrolled bush fires, unofficial grazing and unauthorised logging.
To boost agro-production, Sankara implemented back-up measures such as the building of stone anti-erosion dikes (diguettes), water retention basins and valley reservoirs. He aimed to strengthen the rural people, who make up 90 per cent of the population, and reduce the privileges of urbanites. Despite resistance from the country's Muslims, he also advocated a better political and social status for women. Sankara had recognised that they played a major role in agro-production, and said they should therefore have a say in political decisions. Literacy campaigns and improvement of the public health system were to benefit women in particular.
Despite that, Sankara's policy failed in implementation because he pursued atop down approach and did not include the people in his decisions and programmes to a sufficient degree. His programmes were executed like military operations. For example, he ordered that free-roaming livestock was to be shot, which the rural people rejected. Livestock was one of their most important sources of income. "But the village afforestation programme was implemented consistently," said Günter Winckler, who worked for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Burkina Faso until 1988. However, when the farmers' livestock had grazed all available pasture land, they opened the fences to use the afforestation as a last fodder reserve. Livestock is more important for the Burkinabé than forests.
The building of anti-erosion dikes, which Sankara promoted to preserve soil fertility, has developed rapidly in many regions across the country. Minister Spranger was also shown one of these successful projects during his visit to Burkina. The showpiece was the Patecore project on the Mossi plateau, which the GTZ has promoted since 1988. Some 50,000 people a year are mobilised here for erosion control measures. A total of 430 village organisations, including 93 women's groups, are participating in the project. According to GTZ expert Kirsch-Jung, the project's measures have achieved a 40 per cent increase in millet yield.
Patecore - the participatory showpiece project
Patecore is now also regarded as a model for applying participatory planning and implementation approaches and project accompanying and dialogue procedures which conform with the latest state of the art in development cooperation. Besides resource protection, the Patecore project's goal is also empowerment, meaning strengthening planning and decision-making structures in the villages.
The approach is an open, unstructured, qualitative method typical of social science. Togetherwith experts, the local planning and decision-making organisations identify conflicts, problems and possible solutions, system links and potential scope for action. Mediation of conflicts over land use rights between the Peulh, the livestock keepers, and the Mossi, the crop farmers, is particularly important for the project's success. Typical participatory methods are used to analyse problems and find solutions, such as rights of way settled by sketches on parcel paper or a "palaver".
Simple instructions needed
But there have also been difficulties in applying these methods. The experts in situ view the instructions for project accompanying participatory procedures as often being too complicated. That emerges from several evaluations of the project. The criticism seems to be understandable. For social scientists, who are supposed to update the methods for practical project work, tend frequently to formulate instructions in their professional jargon and overload them didactically so that an actually simple method comes across as highly complicated. The motto appears to be: what looks like a scientific treatise is worth more than a simple statement. But with respect to project practice this way of thinking is wrong. Simple instructions are called for, such as listen, ask questions, understand, compare notes.
Local experts overtaxed
The open, participatory approach often overtaxes local experts, including in the case of Patecore. A 1996 report to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) said: "The field teams feel (and are) overtaxed by large parts of the implementation you demand." The teams lack depth of focus in analysing observations made in the field and in evaluating the collected data. The teams have developed strategies which completely miss the mark of the people's needs.
Participation must be learned and also wanted. Local experts from the city with an academic training think in terms of their social class and often are not prepared to get involved with the problems of the rural population. One reason why the socialist-in spired Sankara failed was that he did not heed the fact that the Burkinabé think in hierarchical terms and behave according to their position in society. His policy greatly overtaxed the women, who were used to the patriarchal hierarchy.
Using indigenous leadership structures
Compaoré is more realistic than was Sankara. He has promised the World Bank good governance, although in rural areas there are no institutions for modern government. That is why he uses the indigenous leadership structure, the chefs de terre and the Mossi king, whose palace electricity supply was cut off by Sankara, who also stripped him of power.
Bureaucracy inhibits participatory attitude
Not only African heads of state are overtaxed in implementing concepts aimed at stronger participation of the people and thus structural change. German government development officials also have problems in handling them. That is also no surprise in a development bureaucracy which is still organised on strict hierarchical lines. This certainly does not inspire participatory, self-responsible action. As is well-known, the fruits of participatory approaches grow slowly. But bureaucrats often are in a hurry to show results to their superiors. During Minister Spranger's visit to West Africa there were frequent discussions between BMZ officials and local experts on whether a results-oriented procedure would not be better than a project oriented one. A German government adviser working in the Ivory Coast agriculture ministry complained in Abidjan that the cooperation partners were more critical today than earlier and no longer adopted the experts' solutions without reservation. He had not grasped that participation begins precisely at this point. For this is where the signals are set for elaborating solutions as partners.
The participation-makers
Another problem is how German technocrats handle participation. They see it as a means of presenting results to their employers. In Prussian style, they attempt to push through participation from above, asking the question: "How can the target group be made participatory?" The men of action of earlier days now 'make' participation, as that is the performance that is currently called for in the development business. Results-oriented thinking is no longer politically correct.
Yet another thing is dangerous. That is to assume that a model developed in our democratic society over decades will without further ado be understood and adopted in Africa. Decades of development cooperation have given rise to a "recipient mentality", plus the concept that experts are always standing by with help and advice. Are we not pursuing with our participation ideas a new transfer of ideology following the failed approaches of recent decades of transferring modernisation and dependence?
Caution is required. Countries such as Burkina Faso, where droughts and food shortages threaten the lives of many people, should not be made the playgrounds of participatory approaches. The priority here is survival. That does not mean that it is not worthwhile investing in developing the people's understanding of participation. But when this comprehension took decades to develop in Europe, one must also have patience in Africa.
But time is pressing in the Sahel, and the development of participatory approaches is lengthy. It is poverty that is driving the people there to destroy their resources. When people are hungry they think about their immediate needs rather than considering a long-term solution to their problems.
Women, who in West Africa secure most of the food for their families, are very pragmatic in articulating what they expect of development assistance. "Give us water pumps and seeds," they say. They have concrete ideas of how they can use these goods to improve the lot of their families. These needs must be addressed. It is not difficult to satisfy them quickly.
Pragmatic solutions which in the longterm have no negative impacts for the people involved make more sense in countries where it is first and foremost about survival. Development of lengthy participatory approaches with those affected by them must be pursued in tandem, as in the longterm they can contribute to changing the social structure and improving the situation of the poor. But those who modify and apply these approaches must face facts and orient themselves on the daily lives of the people. That is, incidentally, a core idea of participatory approaches. And daily life in the Sahel is indeed a daily battle for survival.