Women and Resilience in the Sahel: flexible and indestructible
By Beatrix Attinger Colijn, Regional IASC GenCap Adviser in Humanitarian Action
Boris Cyrulnik is considered the founder of the concept of “resilience’” and has described it, as one can read below, as the art of navigating in the torrent. Bringing the concept to the Sahel region, where torrents are rather scares, one might better compare it with the art of walking through a sand storm. Were you ever caught in a real sand storm and tried to walk upright with a clear vision of where you were going? – Right!
When I imagine a typical landscape in Niger, I see camels and men riding them elegantly; and looking around I see some women, carrying water buckets back to the huts, sitting on donkeys riding to the field, or keeping together a group of goats. Being a woman in Niger - and in the Sahel at large - means you are at the very end of the world’s gender equality index list and you might belong to the 63% of Niger’s population living below the poverty line, two thirds of whom are women. The cultural and legal framework will also imply that you will have very limited access to education, land, and heritage. And when a crisis sets in on the region and your life, you will not only have to overcome the inequality of opportunities for women but also the hardship the crisis imposes on the population.
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| Farmers with newly received seeds, photo from the August newsletter of Eden. Copyright: Eden Foundation. |
Resilience in my language is translated into being flexible and indestructible. The food security crisis has long demanded coping strategies from the population at risk, such as labor migration within countries or across borders. If the male head of the family leaves home in search of work, it is the woman who stays behind with the children, in Niger usually in high numbers, and it is her who will have to reinvent the means to provide for the livelihood of the family.
