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When women decide: Stories of pastoral resilience
Three pastoral women in Niger and Mali made decisions their communities did not expect.
Across the Sahel, where herders move livestock across borders and pressure on that mobility is growing, communities are reclaiming resilience through decisions made locally, in households, camps, and village funds, and women’s part in them is rarely counted.
“What to do? Another death… the third this week.”
Sa'a, 44, is a traditional midwife and a matron to young girls and mothers in the Malley camps, in Bangui commune, a trading point between Niger and Nigeria. Women there trusted her knowledge, and that day she had run out of answers.
Work the statistics overlook
Her midwifery sits within a pastoral economy that is large and thinly recorded. In Niger, pastoralism accounts for about 13.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to a 2026 study by the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) based on a 2022 household survey.
The survey also shows where women stand: they manage 59 per cent of the revenue from dairy sales, yet only 5 per cent of households are headed by women and women own 18.5 per cent of the livestock.
Rahmatou, of the Darkoye Women's Association, says in an International Land Coalition article that women's dairy work is "often overlooked in economic statistics" yet "an essential source of income and food security for many pastoralist families". Solange Bandiaky-Badji, president of the Rights and Resources Initiative, writes: "Pastoralist women are central to livestock economies, food systems, households and community resilience. But they are often excluded from land ownership, mobility rights, leadership and formal decision-making."
What holds this economy together is mobility, which Saoudata Aboubacrine, Secretary General of Tin Hinan, calls “an adaptation strategy developed over generations”. In the Central Sahel it is also under threat: Giulio Morello, research manager at Samuel Hall, and Joelle Rizk, migration adviser for Africa at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), wrote in a personal capacity in Forced Migration Review in February 2022 that “transhumant mobility – the main resilience strategy in the Central Sahel harsh environment – may no longer be viable”.
In SNV’s approach, reclaiming resilience starts with the view that resilience depends on local systems that keep working under pressure, and on the people who run them. Mobilité Pastorale transfrontalière apaisée et Stabilité sociale au Sahel (MOPSS), an initiative on peaceful cross-border pastoral mobility, and Pro-ARIDES, an agri-food resilience programme in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, both reflect that approach. The three women below show what that looks like: they changed how a health centre, a household, and a village fund worked.
What changed when women made choices
For 24 months Sa'a had been adapting to a sedentary life after her partner decided the family should settle. As food came under pressure and cereal prices rose, she watched mothers and children grow weaker, and herbal potions were no longer enough: children were not reaching adulthood and women were dying in childbirth or soon after. A small group of women asked her to help, though the camps keep an unspoken rule that hardship stays inside.
One market day she carried milk to Hassia, a regular customer who works at the Integrated Health Centre, and found a meeting planning a screening campaign for malnourished children. "How can we explain our situation without being exposed to ridicule?" she asked herself. She spoke, and Hassia persuaded the head of the centre to act.
The screening, run with Pro-ARIDES, found high rates of malnutrition among children under five and women. Sa'a was named a Mother of Light by unanimous vote, one of the women who form a first line of defence against malnutrition, in a model adapted to pastoral camps, where there is one Mother of Light for eight women rather than the legal standard of one for 20. She says women now attend the sessions in large numbers, that no children are dying in the camps around Malley, and that 33 new Mothers of Light work beside her.
Kadidia Bamba, 33, keeps cattle in Sikasso, in southern Mali, in a community that long saw that work as men's work. When her partner, Siriki Koné, fell seriously ill and needed evacuation to Bamako, more than 400 kilometres away, she had to decide which animals to sell without undermining the herd's future. "It was thanks to the profits from selling a few animals that I was able to contribute to my husband's evacuation and medical care," she recalls. She now has a say in decisions about the animals, the children's education, and health emergencies. "It isn't always easy," she says, "but pastoralism has given me autonomy, and that means a lot to me."
Kadidia Dioni, from Koury in Mali, belongs to the Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA). She used to be shy and had trouble speaking in front of people, until she was selected for a leadership training for young leaders. She says speaking up no longer holds her back, and that it has changed how she works with others: “Before, I was very wary. Today, I collaborate better, I make decisions faster, and I am more confident.” She says the training also led her to found a women’s association in Koury, which now has 15 members. Every Tuesday, each member puts 250 CFA francs (about €0.38) into a savings fund that finances income-generating activities, and through the association she supports her own needs and those of the other members. Fifteen volunteer women have also contacted her to be trained by her. She hopes the association will endure and expand, into soap making and the processing of millet and peanuts.
Each woman acted inside the system that existed. That resilience has meant that each of those systems now runs a little differently.