WILDAF is happy to propose you Roukiéta’s story, a woman farmer from Burkina trained in the framework of the project “Using law for rural women’s empowerment in West Africa ”, started since January 2009 in five countries, mainly Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Togo.

There are obvious links between poverty and the violation of women’s rights, and the knowledge and use of law constitute an efficient means of empowerment and fight against poverty. These are some of the lessons we can draw from Daare Roukiéta’s story, one of the 250 woman farmers trained and coached in the framework of the project.

After 16 months of implementation, these women, transformed by the power conferred by knowledge and awareness, are performing marvels on the field.

Rather follow Roukiéta’s case.

I am Roukiéta Daare, a woman farmer in Boalin, Burkina Faso. I am married and mother of 4 children.

For me, everything began with the paralegal training WILDAF gave rural women. Before this training, I was working in my husband’s farm, a vegetable farm. I was timid with no self-confidence. But with this training, I understood that I can share something with the women in my community, provided I want it. According to my commitment during the training, I decided to sensitise women in my community on their basic rights. But before that, I had to solve two important problems. First, I had to solve the problem related to my lack of education. We were trained in Mooré, but the working documents we were given after the training were in French. I had never attended school for being able to master the themes developed. To solve this problem, I had had to call on a more resourceful woman paralegal to help me better understand the themes and, possibly, translate the important parts of the training document. Thanks to her, I could better understand things.

The second difficulty is that, being in a Muslim area, our community is not accustomed to seeing a woman sensitise populations and talk of socio-cultural matters. Consequently, my husband and a few members of my family did not want me to undertake any sensitisation. I discreetly had had to beg some influential personalities’ support for advocating with my husband. It was a success and I could begin the sensitisation sessions.

After the third session, a group of women in my community came and expressed their concerns and needs: they wanted to become literate and have access to credit for carrying out income generating activities. I did not know what to do immediately, but, all the same, I noted down their complaints. I decided to bring their complaints to whom it may. I still did not know what to do, so I referred to my parents and other more experienced people who proposed a few possible solutions and steps likely to end up successfully.

On these experienced people’s advice, I went to the heads of the regional head office of agriculture for the literacy issue. They sent me to the appropriate service. The leaders of this unit, after listening to me and a few investigations, made a room and teaching materials available to us and took all the costs in charge. The first level took place and covered three months. For the credit, I first went to an institution called ODE that grants small credits to women. Unfortunately, I came up with a negative result. In the end, FAARF (Support Fund for Women’s Income Generating Activities) accepted to give us the loan. But beforehand, some conditions were to be fulfilled, among which two principally: to get organised into groups because FAARF grants credit only to groups and choose, for the groups, leaders who own identity papers. It is to be noted that some of these women and I usually work individually on other people’s farms for insignificant remunerations. Once back, I informed the women of the conditions required for the loan and devoted myself to organising them into groups according to each woman’s field of interest and choice. On the whole, 12 groups of 25 to 30 members each were born among which one of shea producers, another for transforming peanut into peanut paste, and others for producing dolo soap, soumbalé, and still others undertook various small businesses, etc. With the other women, we could identify women who accepted to act as group leaders and to guarantee members for paying the loans back. After all these moves, I went back to FAARF managers who discussed with every member to get informed on their individual motivations. A few days later, the grant was confirmed. For the moment, we have received a loan amounting to F FCA 25,000 per person. Payment will start at the end of the sixth month of activity. Together with other women from our area and the social worker recruited by the project for coaching us, we have undertaken the administrative process in order to obtain agreement certificates for the groups.

Some paralegals of our area (Ziniaré) took the example of my work to have women in their areas organised into groups. Together with these paralegals, we advocated with the local authorities, mainly the traditional chief and the landowners, to acquire lands for our groups. Our steps were successful and today every group has received at least 3 hectares of land. Meanwhile, we asked officials from the Ministry of Women’s Promotion to come and sensitise us on maternal and reproductive health. On 15 October 2009, in the framework of the world woman farmer’s day, there was an exhibit of agricultural products in Ziniaré where I exhibited my own production based on enhanced seeds. My products were selected and I was awarded F CFA 150,000 and a bicycle.

Today, my husband and neighbours are proud of me!