De-marginalising frontier communities in West Africa: action research, local knowledge, and resilience against natural disasters and ecological stress

West Africa is one of the poorest regions of the world, and also subject to different climate change related environmental stresses - such as desertification, flooding, landslides, and unpredictable rains. The majority of the inhabitants of the region rely on climate-sensitive economic activities and depend on natural resources for their livelihoods (UNDP 2011). Frontier communities in Guinea, Mali and Senegal are particularly prone to the effects of long and short-term environmental shocks and stresses, which can have significant negative repercussions for their subsistence activities. However, putting the emphasis on their fragility, precarity and susceptibility to extreme climate events without acknowledging their important and long-standing resilience building strategies in the face of recurrent environmental stresses misses the opportunity to realise their potential to drive transformative adaptation and to open up new pathways for sustainable development. Despite there being ample evidence showing the important role of local repertoires of knowledge in building resilience capacity before and after climate related shocks and stresses, these rich repertoires have often been devalued or ignored in the design of climate change and sustainable development programs and projects.

The overall aim therefore, of this project is to help re-centre the resilience thinking and practice in climate change adaptation policy back in local actors and communities themselves and enhance the efforts geared to achieve a more equitable sustainable development in West Africa by de-marginalising frontier communities in Senegal (Casamance), Mali (Kayes) and Guinea (Upper-Guinea). The project will focus on the longue-durée resilience strategies of populations particularly at risk (women and descendants of formerly enslaved populations). It will aim to facilitate their involvement and leadership in community-based resilience action planning and organisational learning, and integrate their experiences and knowledges across multiple scales for long-lasting development gains.

Our project team brings together a unique combination of expertise in African history, social anthropology and literary studies, which are less common in development approaches. It aims at constructing a synergistic approach with transformative and catalyst effect by collecting local knowledge that can be harnessed for development activities located at the intersections between poverty, environmental sustainability, governance and vulnerability. The transformative aspect of this research relies on building knowledge networks across borders between frontier communities' stakeholders who otherwise would have little chance to connect and to share and compare their experiences and local knowledge. This cross-border knowledge networks will be facilitated by the organisation in partnership with the organisation Donkosira of training workshops with all stakeholders in each case study country, and the development of a mobile and accompanying website where historical and contemporary local knowledge data will be uploaded and made accessible to a wider local and international audience.

The research project is designed to have a significant impact on both frontier communities in West Africa and government and NGOs development work and outcomes in Senegal, Mali and Guinea. Our main impact actions are the development of a mobile app, a website in collaboration with the Malian NGO Donkosira, a school toolkit, a 20-min video, policy papers and a practitioners guide, all designed to reinforce the scalability of the project. The project will build on the existing Donkosira's app and website which aims at preserving local knowledge through connecting communities and generations with technology. Our project will record historical and contemporary knowledge and cultural practices which allow Frontier communities to construct resilience strategies in times of ecological stress and natural disasters. The project will be conducted with 20 village stakeholders from 10 villages (2 stakeholders per village) in Guinea, Mali and Senegal.

The team will organise workshops to first train the stakeholders in data collection, video practice, media, website and mobile app use. This will directly impact their own knowledge and skills as they will then be able to connect and exchange knowledge rapidly across borders, creating an international network of local knowledge which they can in turn use not only to reinforce community development efforts but to further train people. The direct involvement of the stakeholders with local, national and international media will tremendously enhance the visibility and effective dissemination of such community-based knowledge production towards local development. It will raise the profile of those communities and accelerate the work of the local NGO Donkosira. We will also co-produce toolkits and posters on case studies based on the project villages and including short activities around them, which will explain and make the school children reflect on the value of local knowledge for natural resource management and in prevention and management of natural disasters.

Through the project outcomes dissemination, practitioners and policy makers (including national governments, from local NGOs to international agencies) will access, learn from and build their interventions upon this wealth of scalable grassroots knowledge and thus make their programme more effective and less interventionist which in turn will have a much more long lasting impact on the communities they target. These digital and practical resources will be useful for NGOs and policymakers to plan community-centred and locally informed interventions which places equitable resilience at its centre. With the support of Donkosira, the project will measure the impact of the production of this knowledge material/data by monitoring their use by the local populations, including schools, and by the local NGOs and authorities.