SIX-S (Se Servir de la Saison Sèche en Savane et au Sahel), Burkina Faso

Bernard Lédéa Ouedraogo was born in Haute Volta (now Burkina Faso) in 1930. He completed his secondary education in Burkina Faso and gained many diplomas before studying in France, gaining a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1977.

After finishing school in 1950, Ouedraogo became a teacher and school director and then turned to agriculture, here his talents as a trainer led him to the top echelons of the civil service. But he found he was unable to help the farmers and village groups whom he was supposed to be training and left to find out why: 'So we asked ourselves: Is there anything in the organisation of traditional Mossi society that resembles these village groups? We undertook a thorough study of village social organisation, of the people's thinking, of their social and economic structures. We discovered that of the village organisations we examined, it was the NAAM group - a traditional village body composed of young people which undertakes various activities - that had the most highly developed cooperative characteristics. We decided we would attempt to work with the NAAM structures'.

The result has been an initiative which is unique in the whole of Africa. The NAAM groups have prospered, despite the usual problems and initial official opposition. By 1978 there were over 2,500 NAAM groups in the Yatenda area of Burkina Faso, with over 160,000 members.

The transformation of the traditional NAAM groups into modern social structures was a masterpiece of practical sociology by Ouedraogo. He gives four reasons for their success: dynamic local leadership and activity; maintenance of traditional values; proscription of any sort of social, ethnic, political or religious discrimination; training and motivation coming from within the group based on the principle: act on the basis of what people are, what they know, how they live, what they do, what they know how to do and what they want.

The activities of the NAAM groups are as broad as life itself. They grow, build, manufacture, trade. A World Bank report in 1983 listed their 'major construction activities', as having produced 10 warehouses, 9 cereal banks, 7 other workshop buildings, 3 dams and 40 wells, with funding from French, Dutch and Canadian bilateral sources and other international sources, as well as generating their own income.

In 1976 Ouedraogo founded, with the French development expert Bernard Lecomte, the Six S Association (Se Servir de la Saison Sèche en Savane et au Sahel) becoming its Executive Director in 1978. While NAAM is a people's movement, Six S is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to removing three obstacles to peasant mobilisation: the lack of technical know-how to face the unprecedented challenges of drought and desertification; the lack of 'negotiators' to dialogue with officials from governments or aid agencies; and the lack of funds to implement small projects. Six S is also intended to overcome the serious problem of underemployment in the region during the dry season, as its name suggests.

The structure of Six S is a federation of peasant organisations like (and including) NAAM from nine countries in the region: Burkina Faso, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Togo, Niger, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissao and the Gambia. It is very tightly structured with especially strict control of financial disbursements, but that control is, and is perceived to be, firmly located in the farmers' groups themselves, which is one of the reasons the farmers identify so totally with Six S and trust it.

In early 1989 there were 4,000 village groups in Six S (2,600 of them NAAM groups) divided into 89 zones: 46 in Burkina Faso, 30 in Senegal, 8 in Mali, 2 each in Togo and Niger and 1 in Mauritania. The other countries are just getting organised. In 1987 Six S was reckoned to serve over 2 million people, on the basis of a direct membership of 245,000 farmers.

In 1989 the Red Cross/Red Crescent magazine wrote of Ouedraogo's work: 'It is probable that no other African in recent years has had such an influence on the lives of African farmers as Mr. Ouedraogo'.

'The danger for many Africans is that the erosion of our ways by the aggressive ways of others, our own values by foreign values, will destroy our sense of responsibility for solving our communities' problems'.