How it began
Zaï is the word in the Moore language for wide, deep planting holes, a traditional technique of farmers in Yatenga Province on the Central Plateau of what is now Burkina Faso. The practice had largely fallen out of use until the severe droughts around 1980. Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer born in Yatenga in 1946, returned to his village at that time and began experimenting with the traditional pits. He made them somewhat larger and filled them with manure and compost before sowing. The Oxfam-funded Agro-Forestry Project based at Ouahigouya reintroduced zaï in the same years alongside its stone bunds.
Before it existed
By the 1970s much of the land in Yatenga was eroded and capped with a hard crust, known locally as zipeela, that could not be cropped without being improved. Average rainfall at Ouahigouya had fallen from about 720 mm a year to about 440 mm within twenty years. A large internationally funded project of the 1960s had built earth bunds by machine to drain runoff away from fields, without involving local people, and farmers did not maintain them. Many people left for the cities when harvests failed.
How it works
A farmer digs pits roughly 15 to 50 centimeters across and 5 to 15 centimeters deep, spaced about 80 centimeters apart, in soil that water does not easily enter. Each pit collects and concentrates rainfall and runoff around the plant. Manure or compost placed in the pit supplies nutrients, and it attracts termites whose tunnels break up the soil further. Millet, sorghum or tree seedlings are then planted in the pits, often behind lines of stone that slow the runoff.
How it spread
In 1984 Sawadogo began holding "zaï markets" on his land to share what he had learned, and he later trained farmers in zaï classes. In 1989, 13 farmers from the Tahoua region of Niger visited his fields and started restoring degraded land with zaï when they returned home. 1990 was a drought year, and farmers who had used the pits had a reasonable harvest, after which the technique spread in Niger, where it is also called tassa. It has since been adopted by smallholders in semi-arid parts of East Africa, including Kitui in Kenya.
Who pushed back
Sawadogo faced opposition in his own village when he began. According to the Right Livelihood foundation, neighbors called him a madman for breaking with the customary way of making zaï, and the forest he was growing on restored land was set on fire. He continued, and over time other farmers came to adopt his methods.
What lasted
By 2016 the technique was estimated to have restored the productive capacity of tens of thousands of hectares in the Yatenga and Gourcy areas alone. Sawadogo used the pits to grow a forest of about 40 hectares with more than 60 species of trees and bushes on land that had been barren. In places the concentration of runoff has helped recharge groundwater, with well levels reported to have risen by 5 to 17 meters. Sawadogo received the Right Livelihood Award in 2018 and died in 2023.
