Land, investment and migration: a portrait of village life in Mali

This is a recording of a webinar hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) on 17 June, 2020, that discussed how people survive and thrive in the uncertain and risk-prone Sahel, through the findings of a long-term study on the village of Dlonguebougou in Central Mali.

Timed to coincide with UN World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, the webinar examined the transformations to land use, people, and livelihoods in Dlonguebougou over almost four decades, as chronicled in Camilla Toulmin’s book 'Land, Investment, and Migration, Thirty-five Years of Village Life in Mali'.

Among the questions explored were:

*How do the people of Dlonguebougou survive and thrive in the uncertain and risk-prone Sahel?
*What can we learn from this and other long-term studies about how lives change over generations?
*How have pressures of land affected patterns of farming and land use?
*What shifts in people’s values and attitudes have impacted on household organisation and social resilience?
*What messages from this study would bring more sustainable landscapes and livelihoods for Sahelian people, especially given the worsening conflict across the region?

The speakers were Toulmin, an economist with particular expertise on dryland Africa, and a former director of IIED; Bara Guèye, a rural economist, with more than 35 years of experience of development practice in Francophone West Africa; Professor Nicholas Stern, the chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics. The event was facilitated by IIED director Andrew Norton.

More information: https://www.iied.org/land-inve....stment-migration-por