Addressing drought through rural religious communities in Senegal

Abstract

Severe ecological changes across the Sahel have created a difficult environment for agriculture and rural village economies. Rural communities, while small in scale, are creating new ways to transform their degraded environment. Their small size allows them to develop location-specific strategies to manage and improve water, soil and agriculture. This article focuses on two Sufi communities (daaras) in Senegal that integrate environmental work and spirituality. Religious organizations are influential in Senegal, as is the idea that labour is a part of both personal spirituality and shared religious teachings. As agriculture continues to be disrupted because of climate fluctuations, creating a habitable environment relies on applying region-specific agricultural science, and working through local structures. These conceptions of labour, along with the religious structures that support their work, make environmental projects spiritually significant, and also transformative for agriculture in a challenging environment.

Religious networks and small businesses in Senegal

“…Ndem's daara is Baay Fall, a suborder of the Muridiyya that teaches that labor is a form of prayer. This belief, controversially to non–Baay Falls, equates labor to one of the pillars of Islam: salat , praying five times a day (Cochrane 2020, 340–41). Creating a livable place in a degraded environment is religiously motivated: It is caring for God's creation and God's people.…”

Docudrama and the Agential Child: Treading a Path Between Melodrama and National Geographic

“…For about three‐quarters of the film, we see children participating in economic activities. Even if most of these are crafts that are deeply rooted in the cultures of rural West Africa (Chalfin, 2004; Cochrane, 2012; MacGaffey, 2009), including weaving (Cochrane, 2012), shea‐butter (Chalfin, 2004) and oil‐making and blacksmithing (MacGaffey, 2009), and even if children are doing these activities alongside their parents; they are economic activities that in classical economics would therefore be defined as work. This creates a tension between the representation, which concurs with the local view, and its reception.…”