UW center to assist in West Africa

by Kurt Brown and Annie Bellinger

The university’s Land Tenure Center will assist the Sahelian countries of Africa in their sustainable development and natural resource management efforts.

The region includes Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal. The Sahel’s ecology makes these countries prone to high rates of deforestation, erosion and soil degradation, and the region’s expanding population adds stress to its marginal ecology, and conflicts over land and resource use are rising in all the countries.

“These efforts always involve a complex range of legal, historical and social issues,” says Harvey M. Jacobs, director of the center. “The Land Tenure Center is a global resource that has worked with international land issues for nearly 40 years. By providing people with specialized expertise and the skills to advise on possible courses of action, we hope to help bring improvements that will benefit all residents of the Sahel region.”

LTC experts will help plan “land tenure observatories,” which will be university centers of research, training and technical assistance. These centers will focus on causes of deforestation, farmer-herder conflicts, the security of women’s access to irrigated land, desertification, and peri-urban expansion.

Training will focus on tenure theory and research methods, first for faculty and students, then government officials and development project employees, especially at the local level.

Center experts will assist national teams as they begin to put the observatories into action. The center is collaborating with the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel. The project will eventually establish a land tenure observatory and network in each country. Plans are most advanced in Chad, where LTC is working with the University of N’Djamena.

LTC senior scientist Peter Bloch, also a faculty associate of the Department of Forest Ecology and Management, will provide technical advice on the research and training.

Others from UW who will be involved are Yazon Gnoumou, project assistant in land resources, James Delehanty, associate faculty associate in African Studies, and Matt Turner, associate professor of geography.

LTC has collaborated with CILSS on its agendas of land tenure and decentralization of natural resource management since 1990. This new effort is part of a larger project funded by the United States Agency for International Development/Sahel Regional Program.

Since 1962, LTC has conducted research, training, education, and advisory programs in more than 75 countries, including 38 in Africa.