Variation in land endowments among villages in West Africa: Implications for land management

Land endowments held by African rural communities affect the constraints and incentives they face, which in turn influence their response to development and conservation programs and policies. Availability of land with different qualities varies at different social organizational scales. While much work has focused on differences among households within villages, there has been little empirical work on variation among villages despite the fact that villages are often the sites through which land is accessed. This reflects serious difficulties in delineating village territories. Using a newly developed approach, this study estimates per capita cropland and rangeland availability of villages within two study areas in northern Burkina Faso: the provinces of Seno and Yatenga. Using georeferenced village population data, “village influence zones” were estimated taking account of each village’s population and that of surrounding villages. Combining these with land-cover classifications allowed for estimations of average per capita cropland and rangeland for 725 villages. Large variation of land endowments is observed at fine spatial scales within the two provinces. For a subset of twenty-four villages, these values were compared with informants’ estimates of cropland (fraction of cropland fallowed, fraction of cropland manured, and fraction of cropland from which crop residues are harvested) and rangeland management (seasonal presence of village livestock in village territory) parameters. Rates of crop residue harvesting were found to increase with cropland scarcity and small ruminant presence during the cropping season declined with less rangeland accessibility. The results of this study raise questions about one-size-fits-all approaches to rural development by revealing fine-scaled mosaics of village land endowments and management needs.