Felt Needs

Often while living in Burkina Faso, I was reminded that even though I have significantly more education than the local villagers, they knew more than I—especially about how to live in this dry desolate wasteland that looked like a moonscape. They taught me so much about how to make do with what we had. Even today on our small farm, I often try to repair even inexpensive items because of the lessons I learned about stewarding resources from the villagers. 

After successfully constructing a 62-acre lake in the arid Sahel, we began to make plans for gardens below the dam. I talked to the villagers about saving some land below the dam to construct some small ponds to raise fish fingerlings to stock the large lake as well as the dozen other smaller ponds that we had also built. The villagers did not like my idea of saving garden space that could produce a lot of dry season food, and I did not understand why. Exasperated at them for not giving me more information on why they were opposed to the small pond idea, I finally said to them, “Why do you not want to build fingerling ponds below the dam?” 

Their response was one word- “birds.” My mind was racing trying to think about birds and fishponds and what their problem was. After more coaxing they finally got it through my thick skull. When birds move from one water catchment to another, they are transporting fish eggs on their legs, so we would not have to worry about fish getting introduced into our new lakes and water catchments. 

My fish fingerling program would not meet a felt need of the villagers. 

In community development work, felt needs are changes deemed necessary by the local people to correct the deficiencies they perceive in their community. Opinion and perception are everything when trying to help people help themselves. 

During my years of working in community development I have tried to practice a “hand up” rather than a “hand out.” “A hand up” means to help up out of poverty and not simply provide free goods and services. 

I grew a plot of sorghum seed from the USA, and when the plants were mature, I invited some villagers to come see the seed plot. The villagers’ mouths dropped open when they saw the size of the seed heads of the sorghum plants. However, when I offered these seed for distribution, there were no takers.  

I was puzzled, so I asked my villager friends why. Their responses were all the same: my sorghum stalks were less than one meter tall, and their stalks were over two meters. They depended on their tall stalks for cooking fires, so my sorghum would produce less than one half of biomass than their traditional sorghum. Plus, birds already ravage their crops sitting on their tall skinny sorghum stalks, and the villagers told me that the birds would eat all the grain on those short stiff stalks!

I had the graduate degree in agriculture, and the villager farmers could not read and write, but look who learned the most about how to feed their family in the semi-arid Sahel of West Africa!