Mapping Agricultural Research in West Africa

Earlier this month I spent a week in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso providing GIS support to a research methods meeting of the Collaborative Crop Research Program (CCRP). The CCRP is funded by the McKnight Foundation, and I was invited to work on the project by my friend and colleague Karsten Vennemann who has been working with McKnight for the past few years on a variety of projects.

When I agreed to work with Karsten on this project and told friends and family I would be traveling to Burkina Faso, the inevitable initial response was “Where’s that?!?” It is in West Africa, bordered by Mali and Niger to the west and east, and by Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin to the south.

Ouagadougou is in the center of this map; red points represent CCRP project sites (based on data we had available prior to the workshop)
A close up of the locator from one of the CCRP maps. Burkina Faso is the red area.

Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, and is located in the center of the country in a region of Africa known as the Sahel, where the Sahara transitions to the forests closer to the equator and the Atlantic coast.

The workshop was attended by 24 CCRP grantees, with two attendees from each of 12 projects located in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Support staff included Dr. Ric Coe and Dr. David Stern from University of Reading, Dr. Bettina Hausman from the University of Hohenheim, Dr. Hamado Tapsoba (based in Ouga), and me. The workshop was conducted in French, which presented certain difficulties for me at times, but fortunately Bettina and David were able to translate for me as necessary.

Group shot of workshop participants, taken at the end of the week
GIMEM sites in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger with study sites and landcover
Areas of climatic similarity for Seed Systems sites in Mali relative to the balance of the CCRP West African Region. The redder the cell, the higher the climatic similarity; the greener, the lower. I created this map using Homologue