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The village landscapes in the Sudano-Sahelian belt of Burkina Faso are used in many ways by the people living there. A majority of the population are subsistence farmers, and combine cultivating dryland crops with animal husbandry. As a master student, I joined a project about exploring the connection between ecosystem services and local livelihoods in northern Burkina Faso, led by my now SRC colleague Hanna Sinare. She had produced high-resolution village maps of landscape patches, ecosystem services and livelihood benefits, using participatory mapping methods and aerial photographs. I used these village maps, combining them with my own data collected in the field through transect walks and interviews, to produce up-scaled regional maps from satellite imagery.
My colleagues and my work in this research project, and the results from a couple of others that followed it, gives a nuanced picture of the landscape in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa. It shows how local livelihoods depend on a diversity of activities and resources that are being provided across the landscape, and also that people are managing the landscape to maintain this multifunctionality. To understand these places, therefore, one cannot focus on one thing at a time. It is in the hands-on, everyday interactions between human and non-human that this landscape takes shape.
In the following posts, I will share some stories about the uses of different plants. Stories told by people I met during those months of fieldwork. They provide some of the details in the much larger picture of this landscape.
Photo: Farmers harvesting sorghum in a village east of Ouahigouya, October 2014. Posted on Instagram January 10, 2021.
Katja Malmborg 