When Moumouni Abdoulaye and his fellow herders in western Niger used to set off on scouting missions in search of water, they feared for their livestock – and for their own lives.

Unable to rely anymore on their traditional methods of predicting the weather amid increasingly erratic droughts and floods, and lacking modern climate information, they struggled to predict where, and when, they might find water in the vast arid region.

“We were living in limbo. Without knowledge, we constantly risked our lives,” said Abdoulaye, seeking shade under a tree from the fierce midday sun in Niger’s Tillabery region.

But a project to involve the region’s semi-nomadic people in the production of locally-specific, real-time weather forecasts – and provide them with radios and mobile phones to receive and share the information – is transforming the lives of tens of thousands of Nigeriens like Abdoulaye.

“Now we receive daily updates about rainfall, can call other communities to ask if they have had rain, and plan our movements accordingly,” Abdoulaye told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Niger, as across much of Africa’s Sahel region, frequent droughts have impoverished many people and made it much harder to make a living from agriculture. That is happening in a West African country already consistently ranked at the bottom of the U.N. Human Development Index.

With climate change now exacerbating pressures, experts say there is a growing and urgent need for better climate information, to ensure farmers and pastoralists are equipped to cope with unpredictable rainfall and climate shocks.

Across Africa, only limited climate data is collected and made available, and information services are often not well understood, user-friendly, or followed up to help people put the information to use in adapting to climate threats, experts say.

Ensuring that communities play a role – alongside state and aid agencies – in generating and sharing weather information is the best way to get them to use it and to build their resilience to the growing pressures, said Blane Harvey of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

“Co-participation is very powerful because people will buy into a service if they’ve had a hand in producing it,” he said.

“Crucially, they bring in their local knowledge, which helps to downscale and triangulate more regionalized forecasts,” added Harvey, a research associate at the London-based think tank.

Collaboration crucial

A lack of weather stations across Africa means that forecasts, produced by national meteorological agencies, tend to be too broad to be of much use at a local level.

But a project launched in 2015, funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and led by CARE International, is trying to improve the quality of and access to climate data for farmers and pastoralists in western Niger.

CARE’s project under the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program aims to help 450,000 people become better prepared for climate shocks, including through giving them access to better forecasts.

The goal is to help them diversify their farming and find ways of making money which are not so heavily impacted by climate change, in order to better withstand climate pressures.

For farmer Adamou Soumana, improved access to climate information has given his village a better understanding of the weather shocks they are encountering, and the confidence to adopt resilience boosting strategies such as using climate-adapted seeds, finding sustainable ways to harvest forest products, and storing harvests.

“Previously, if it rained in January, we rushed to plant our crops thinking the rainy season starts – when in fact it never comes before May,” he said.

“Now we understand climate shocks, and can plan our activities in advance. We feel more resilient,” he said.

The BRACED project has helped communities by acting as a broker between them and meteorological agencies, and ensuring agency partners are trained to interpret climate data, translate it into local languages and help people to make sense of the forecasts.

The project also connects local people who collect rainfall data, as well as other farming and pastoralist leaders, with community radio stations to share real-time information daily.

Incorporating traditional observations – such as when trees bloom or the way birds behave – and having regular discussions with communities is key to building and maintaining trust in climate information services, said Richard Ewbank of Christian Aid, another charity working on climate resilience issues.

“Having experts and community leaders together and combining local knowledge with scientific forecasts is the best way to agree on a climate scenario, and make key decisions for the coming season,” said the global climate advisor for the charity.

Life or death decisions

In addition to improving the quality of climate information and making it more relevant on a community-by-community basis, the BRACED project in Niger has provided mobile phones and radios to boost the spread of the forecasts.

“Receiving and sharing the information in this way not only helps pastoralists know when and where to move, it also builds relationships and trust between people,” said Amadou Adamou of the Association for the Revitalization of Livestock Breeding.

Good information can not only help pastoralists find water sources but also help them know when to sell their animals, especially if drought is on the way, according to Adamou.

The mobile phones and radios used are powered by solar cells, enabling pastoralists to get forecasts while on the move. They also are given to both male and female community chiefs to ensure women have equal access to the information.

While better climate data has improved resilience for many in Tillabery region, in both settled and nomadic communities, there is still much room for improvement, several experts said.

Residents want to see more meteorological advisers based locally who can help them have regular discussions about the forecasts.

They also want more help to convert the data into action on the ground such as diversifying the crops they grow and better planning the timing and direction of their migration routes in search of water. They also want the information service expanded to cover neighboring countries.

“Getting better forecasts is one thing. But having good, solid advice about what the information means, and discussions on how to use it to become more resilient, is what people in the region really want,” said Harouna Hama Hama of CARE.

For roaming communities like Abdoulaye’s – people who cross into neighboring Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo with their livestock – expanding the climate data effort to produce region-wide forecasts could mean the difference between life and death for many of their members, Abdoulaye said.

“Whenever some of our people head to these countries, they and the animals risk dying of thirst,” he said. “With better forecasts, and for the whole region, we could lose fewer lives.”
…

your ad here

Jostling for space and swatting the smoke away from her eyes, Mariama Ngom sighs as she and her teenage daughter fling fish onto a large grill in a chaotic fishing port in Senegal.

Like thousands of other women in Joal Fadiouth, she works full-time salting and smoking small pelagic fish like mackerel, anchovies and sardines, to be sold across West Africa.

When she moved to the town, south of the capital Dakar, in 2010, Ngom could earn up to 10,000 CFA francs ($16) a day. Now she is lucky to make 3,000 CFA ($5), as catches have plummeted.

“I struggle to feed my six children a lot of the time — I take some of the fish I smoke home … we often have nothing else to eat,” Ngom told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Once among the richest in the world, West Africa’s fish stocks are being depleted by industrial trawlers which comb the oceans to feed European and Asian markets, experts say.

In Senegal, dwindling stocks pose a threat to livelihoods and food security. Some 600,000 people, almost 20 percent of the workforce, work in fishing, and fish accounts for 75 percent ofthe country’s animal protein intake, World Bank data shows.

Many mothers like Ngom have taken their children out of school in recent years, and even brought them to work, as they can no longer afford to pay their fees, said Marianne Teneng Ndaye, head of Joal’s trade federation of women fish-processors.

“The actions of foreign aquaculture factories and trawlers have drained us,” she said, adding that the women had protested and tried to meet with the factory owners, without success.

More than 400 foreign fishing vessels, mainly from China, Europe and Russia, navigate in West African waters, according to environmentalist group Greenpeace.

They include a couple of dozen megatrawlers that target small pelagic fish to make feed for salmon, chicken, pigs and other animals grown at aquaculture and livestock farms around the world, according to Dyhia Belhabib, a fisheries expert.

“In terms of numbers, the amount of boats is tiny but their impact is huge,” said Belhabib, an advisor for the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us research project.

Each megatrawler can capture up to 20,000 tons of fish a year – equal to the annual catch of more than 1,700 traditional Senegalese pirogues – she said.

Fish and feed

Around a quarter of all fish caught in the world’s oceans each year are used to make fishmeal and fish oil, rather than as food for people, according to a recent study published in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

Part of it is used to feed a booming global aquaculture industry, which in 2014 harvested 74 million tons of fish worth an estimated $160 billion, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In Senegal alone, aquaculture production grew 71 percent to 2,082 tons last year, from 1,215 tons in 2015, government figures showed.

“Fish are being used to feed animals, yet we need fish to survive,” said Abdou Karim Sall, the head of a fishermen’s association in Joal, representing about 3,000 boats.

Following pressure from local fishermen, in recent years Senegal has stopped licensing fishing of small pelagic fish to foreign industrial trawlers, but vessels continue to operate from neighboring countries, like Mauritania, Belhabib said.

And trawlers of Asian, European and Western African origin often carry out illegal incursions into waters reserved for locals, or flaunt fishing regulations, experts say.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing costs West African economies $2.3 billion a year, according to a recent study published in Frontiers in Marine Science journal.

To compete with foreign trawlers, Senegalese fishermen have started building more and bigger boats to venture further into the ocean but catches continue to drop, said Sall.

In 2016, fish catches in Joal dropped by 40 percent to 90,000 tons from 150,000 tons the previous year, and the tally is set to decrease even further this year, he said.

“We’ve increased the size of boats and nets but we catch less fish,” Sall said, adding that fish prices at local markets had consequently gone up.

One stock, more nations

A growing number of young Senegalese are turning to fishing due to a lack of work in fields like agriculture, worsening the overexploitation, said Joseph Catanzano, an economist at FAO’s fisheries and aquaculture department.

“All along Senegal’s coast, you see new vessels in preparation,” said Catanzano, adding new boats were rarely registered due to lack of oversight by local authorities.

Some pirogues looking for fish in northern Senegal had waded into Mauritanian waters in recent months causing tensions between fishermen and the local coastguard, he said.

Catanzano said a common strategy by Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and other coastal countries is needed to manage fish stocks, but competing national interests had so far prevailed.

In addition, an accurate assessment of how much fish can be sustainability netted has to be carried before more vessels are allowed to navigate West African waters, said Belhabib.

The use of satellite tracking systems and on board cameras monitoring trawlers’ movements and catch could be stepped up to crack down on illegal fishing but costs were often too high for local governments, she added.

Earlier this week, eight Chinese ships were detained for fishing illegally in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau.

The arrests came after a two-month regional patrol on a Greenpeace ship that carried inspectors from the West African countries in a bid to supplement national efforts.

Yet such patrols alone are unlikely to make an immediate difference for thousands of fishermen working in Joal Fadiouth, like 23-year-old Mamadou Diallo.

“Life is very difficult for everyone working here,” Diallo said, as he waded into the sea at Joal’s beach, teeming with hundreds of fishermen, readying to carry ashore fish unloaded from a pirogue and piled into a box.

“But we are fishermen, this is our life. If we wanted to leave, or had to leave, where would we go?” he said.
…

your ad here

Kwana Simon. Fibi Haruna. Esther Usman. Saratu Ayua. These are some of the young women who were recently released by Boko Haram in exchange for prisoners, according to the Nigerian presidency. Eighty-two of the young women known as the Chibok Girls gained their freedom last weekend. It’s been three long years for the Chibok Girls and throughout it all social media campaigners have kept pressure on the Nigerian government to recover the girls.

“The state failure created a situation where those girls were abducted from school,” says Emman Shehu, a member of the Bring Back Our Girls group in Abuja.

The campaign is arguably the most successful grassroots citizens movement in Nigeria’s recent history. For three years, members have gathered across the Nigerian capital of Abuja and the city of Lagos, carrying banners and marching the streets.

 

But the Bring Back Our Girls group has made its loudest mark on social media. Like the other members, Shehu campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp. The Bring Back Our Girls Whatsapp group has more than 100 participants, including journalists, elected officials and concerned citizens. Thousands of followers get alerts from the group’s Twitter feed.

When dozens of Chibok parents were blocked by police from entering the state house last month, it was the Bring Back Our Girls group who published pictures of the botched rally on their social media channels. It’s on social media that the group’s slogans have become known. Slogans like “Bring Back Our Girls Now And Alive ” and “We Are Fighting For The Soul Of Nigeria” have all been popularized on social media.

 

“As it has turned out when we first started saying it in our slogan without really thinking much about it that the fight for the Chibok Girls is a fight for the soul of Nigeria, it has truly become evident that we’re actually fighting,” Shehu says. “For those of us in the movement this has become the basis to continue. ”

 

Nigerian officials have made repeated references to the social media campaign of Bring Back Our Girls. A tweet from BBOG activist Oby Ezekwesili can be re-tweeted thousands of times.

The group released a statement commending Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari on recovering the 82 girls. But the group is back on social media, pressuring on behalf of the 113 who are still missing. No one knows where they are or if they are even still alive. But the Nigerian president has vowed to ensure that all the Chibok Girls return to their families.

​
…

your ad here