In a Casamance village, women from ten countries learn to raise chickens their own way

Mariama Sonko has spent a quarter of a century organising the rural women of Casamance. This week she welcomed delegations from ten West African countries to a training centre outside Niaguis, Senegal, where the week's subject was poultry — raised without the inputs the market insists are indispensable.

The gathering is the fifth International Training Camp on Peasant Agroecology, and it belongs to the movement Sonko leads, Nous Sommes la Solution — We Are the Solution. She put the week's purpose plainly: food sovereignty is within reach, but people must dare to change and commit to agroecology.

Sonko was born in the early 1970s in Bandjikaky, a Jola woman from a region that has long known both resistance and neglect. Her husband, a teacher, died in the late 1990s and left her with five children. In 1999 she was elected district president of the Niaguis women's promotion group; two years later she became treasurer general of the Casamance young farmers' association. The movement she now leads was launched in Dakar in 2011 and restructured in 2014 so that rural women would run it themselves. It counts some 800 affiliated associations and more than 185,000 members.

Among this year's participants is Fanta Condé of Guinea, the eldest of them, who has argued for sustainable farming longer than most of the women around her have been organising. The opening ceremony was presided over by Idy Gomel Bâ, deputy sub-prefect of Niaguis. Alassane Ndiaye, village chief of Niaguis and president of the Association of Village Chiefs, took part — the host village standing beside the visitors rather than merely lending them ground.

Each edition has taken a single technical subject and worked it through. The first, in 2022, was soil revitalisation and the making of biofertilisers. The second taught horticultural seed production, the third the production and use of bio-protectants. The camps are open to researchers and students as well as farmers, and the centre itself is worked year-round for crops, livestock, fish, bees and food processing, alongside organic seed and biological inputs.

The conditions are modest and Sonko has never disguised them. Beyond mortar, pestle and wooden tools there is little processing machinery. The perimeter fence, installed in 2015, has broken down, and the gates are gone. What the place has instead is its name, given in Jola: Karonghen Wati Naaning, the revitalisation of endogenous practices. The women who walk out to it each morning are being taught nothing that their grandmothers would have found strange — only that it can be done again, deliberately, and taught to someone from another country who will carry it home.