West African agriculture advocate and women’s rights activist to visit Clemson during World Food Day 2012

Published: October 8, 2012

CLEMSON — Dienaba Diallo, pastoralist farmer and president of Burkina Faso’s Collége des Femmes, will tour Clemson University’s Student Organic Farm and Clemson Public Service and Agriculture’s Simpson Beef Cattle Farm Oct. 12 as part of events surrounding World Food Day 2012.

Clemson’s School of Agricultural, Forest and Environmental Sciences (SAFES) and the international relief and development organization Oxfam America will host the tours.

Diallo will learn about Clemson’s work in the local community and around the world to promote food security and increased food production and will speak to students in field crop production and women’s studies classes. Diallo will also meet with Clemson faculty, administrators and researchers.

Diallo is from a region of Burkina Faso in West Africa where millions of people are at risk of hunger and malnutrition. 

Since leaving her career as a history and geography teacher to return to her home village and rejoin her ethnic group's traditional vocation of animal herding, Diallo has advocated for better investment in small-scale producers.

In 1990, along with other pastoralists, Diallo founded the Association for the Promotion of Animal Rearing in the Savannah and the Sahel (APESS). To strengthen pastoralists' ability to feed their animals in spite of shrinking pastureland, APESS encouraged them to plant hay for animal fodder and trained them in milk processing. The group also provided literacy classes for women.

In 2000, Diallo joined other women in her community to establish a mini-dairy where they transform milk into yogurt for distribution in nearby villages.

Diallo also leads a women's unit of the Confederation of Peasants of Burkina Faso to solve such problems as a lack of access to credit and land and to deepen knowledge of the government's agricultural investment plan and strengthen people's capacity to seek those investments. Agriculture comprises 32 percent of Burkina Faso’s gross domestic product and occupies 80 percent of its working population.

The Simpson Beef Cattle Farm, part of Clemson's Public Service and Agriculture Research Farm Services, is one of eight Clemson research farms that support the university’s agricultural research, teaching and public services.

Oxfam America is an international relief and development organization that partners with individuals and local groups in more than 90 countries to create lasting solutions to poverty, hunger and injustice.

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