Living Land

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Restoring the soil to feed

people and fight desertification

Claire Péhi-Verny, President, Association Pour un autre monde

he association ‘Pour un autre monde’ (For another

world) was founded by seven people from the

academic community in Alsace, with the goal of

educating for sustainable development. Pour un autre monde

chose to target school pupils because, being educators, we

believe that what is learned at school can imprint something

in a pupil’s mind and make a more responsible adult. Living

in Alsace, a French province with water pollution problems

and a lively ‘organic network’, we focused on agroecology

for our contribution to stop desertification. We also taught

French and nearby German pupils a form of active solidar-

ity and reflection on their own energy-consuming behaviour.

The association first worked in Sri Lanka after the 2004

tsunami. Coming to Burkina Faso in 2006 was pure chance:

a Burkinabè (resident of Burkina Faso) had seen our website

and requested to partner with us. We have remained in the

country to work in depth in order to address real local needs.

Our first president discovered Africa when he flew to Burkina

Faso. He started the first project in Bobomundi with the help

of the Centre écologique Albert Schweitzer in Ouagadougou,

and signed an agreement with the Government. I discovered

Africa when I was 12 years old. I went to school and univer-

sity in Dakar and Abidjan and married in the Ivory Coast, so

taking part in a Pour un autre monde adventure in Burkina

Faso was only natural.

Soon, contacts with local teachers brought us to the Loroum

Province in the North region. We began training teachers,

pupils and volunteer parents of the first four partner schools in

Sahelian compost making, growing organic vegetables, mulch-

ing, limited watering, water harvesting, shrubbery and tree

planting. Through these endeavours we improve the daily food

rations of both the children and their families. We restore the

degraded soil, sterilized by 40 years of drought, by producing

humus and we plant local trees to combat desert growth, using

seeds from the National Forestry Seeds Centre in Ouagadougou.

The four school gardens of Hargo, Salla, Siguinonguin

and Rimassa attracted the attention of colleagues coming

for meetings at the education offices. We now work with 26

primary school partners, two secondary schools in Loroum

and one 700 km away in Sebba, in the Yagha province of the

Sahel region. Two coordinators, Appolinaire Bazié in Titao,

Loroum province and Souleymane Diabate in Sebba, follow

the projects year-round on a voluntary basis.

Pupils collect material such as cow dung, ash and poultry bones to help create natural compost, and enjoy stamping the damp clay during

watering of the trenches dug by the parents

Images: Association Pour un autre monde

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