Feature
Fatoumata Zoungrana had found a way to help feed her family. Paying for school required something else.
After working in a collective field near Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, she collected plastic waste to sell. Three of her six children were at school. “The school allows us to pay the fees in instalments,” she told Sidwaya, reporting in May.
The field supplied some food; the waste sales helped meet a cash bill. Her predicament opens a larger question for families displaced from agricultural communities: what, exactly, does getting back to farming restore?
The answer depends partly on the bargain that makes cultivation possible. For some, another person provides land and equipment in exchange for a share of the proceeds. Collective fields offer food to take home. Elsewhere, growers squeeze vegetables into borrowed corners and adapt techniques they brought with them. These arrangements reopen livelihoods without necessarily rebuilding everything flight took away.
In Kongoussi, a town in northern Burkina Faso, Adjarata Gansonré was growing aubergines, beans and tomatoes on a host’s land when Studio Yafa reported her experience in March 2024. A displaced mother of nine, she said the space was insufficient. Her host, Souleymane Gansonré, supplied equipment as well as land. After the harvest was sold, expenses were deducted and the remaining money shared.
Both sides gained something. Souleymane said the additional workers had increased his profit. Adjarata could farm again, but the money available to her depended on deductions and sharing, not simply the value of vegetables sold. Neither account specifies the shares.
Finding a plot is itself a negotiation. In research conducted in the western city of Dédougou in May 2023, sociologist Yacouba Tengueri recorded a displaced woman’s account of landowners demanding part of the harvest as a condition of continued access. Other interviews described cash shortages, competition from urban development and fear of travelling to land beyond safer settlements.
Hosts had pressures of their own. One local woman resented what she saw as preferential assistance for displaced people while her household received none. Such accounts complicate the idea that welcoming farmers is simply a matter of generosity: access has to be negotiated among people with competing needs.
Collective fields offer another bargain. At Tolotalama, near Bobo-Dioulasso, participant Aminata Zoromé told Sidwaya that harvests were shared at the season’s end under ministry supervision. At nearby Farakoba, organiser Solange Traoré described starting with rented land in 2021, distributing the maize harvested, then expanding with state support. Vulnerable residents from host communities also participated. The benefit was not reserved for newcomers.
Small plots can produce more than their size suggests, too. In a research account published in October, drawing on a study presented in 2025, Hamidou Tamboura and Kayabila Tougri described displaced growers near Ouagadougou using compost, locally made pest treatments and container cultivation. Host growers learned techniques from them. Displacement had removed access to fields, not erased agricultural knowledge.
But making production possible requires more than finding space. The researchers described temporary, informal access; the collective-field reporting identified equipment and water constraints. At Tolotalama, organisers were seeking repairs to a broken borehole. These were productive arrangements, not livelihoods free of further needs.