#ouagadougou

Under the leadership of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso has launched a massive, state-funded infrastructure campaign to build a 332-kilometre, four-lane (sometimes reported as eight-lane) highway connecting the capital, Ouagadougou, to the commercial hub, Boo-Dioulasso.

The project, part of the Faso Mêbo initiative, is designed to reduce dependence on foreign aid and foreign contractors by using local engineers, soldiers, and newly purchased heavy machinery.

The least ADHD person who's ever been built - Mike Trapp

As far as the eye can see is a hodge-podge of trees, vegetable plots and water tanks. Up close it may look like a gigantic allotment, but this unusual project actually stretches for 2,000 hectares (4,942 acres), a green belt that now completely rings the city of Ouagadougou.

The green belt began life many years ago in the 1970s, with the aim of building a protective wall against the encroaching desert that lies beyond the greenery, just a few steps away. In Burkina Faso, one-third of the territory – about 9 million hectares of productive land – is degraded, with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Burkina Faso is not a climatically favoured country, but the drought of the 1980s exacerbated the problem, leading to significant population movements toward less degraded areas,” explains Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, an environmental economist and expert in land degradation at the Centre Universitaire de Ziniaré (CUZ). But the situation, he says, is not irreversible.

The initial goal of the green belt was to reforest 2,100 hectares at an annual rate of 100 hectares, and by 1986, the area where trees had been planted was 1,032 hectares. The project stuttered a little in later years, despite reaching 2,000 hectares. But new impetus has recently been given to the project, which seeks, beyond holding back the desert, to combat heat and promote urban agriculture to help feed a city that has doubled its population in just 14 years, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Demography (INSD). The deadly heatwave that hit the country last year, with the temperature in Burkina Faso exceeding 42.3C (108F) for three consecutive days, only hammered home the urgency of what is now a vital project for the city.

“The Sahel responds more quickly to climate change, and we are less prepared,” explains climatologist Kiswendsida Guigma at the Climate Centre of the Red Cross Federation in the Burkinabè capital. “When we analyse the situation on a large scale, we realise that the climate phenomenon has contributed to increasing heat. As a result, there are new initiatives like planting trees. People have realised that we need to cool the city, although we haven’t managed to do it on the necessary scale.”

The world’s most ignored displacement crisis: Burkina Faso – in pictures

For the second year in a row, the Norwegian Refugee Council named Burkina Faso the world’s most neglected displacement crisis in 2023 as a jihadist insurgency, the military regime’s brutal response, Russian mercenaries and ethnic-based militias wreak havoc on hundreds of thousands of civilians. The photographer Emre Çaylak has documented the lives of those affected by the crisis living at camps near the capital, Ouagadougou

Photographer: Emre Çaylak