Libya was even a migration option, before that country’s collapse. They’ll go to Tahoua or Agadez to find domestic jobs, or to more prosperous neighboring communities. World Food Program-distributed aid in ToroufĪ place like Torouf often can’t support even a basic consumer economy - sometimes there just aren’t buyers for firewood or bricks. "They’ll build mud bricks, for instance.” In Torouf I asked residents, all of them recipients of some form of WFP aid, what happens in the village when the rains fail.Ītiku, a 24-year-old mother of two, said that people engage in petty commerce, in the hope of earning enough money to purchase food at a market town up the road. “People will just go and look for a menial job," she said. These villages are a glimpse into what markets, infrastructural investment, and targeted aid can accomplish against some of the structural causes of hunger - as well as where they fall short. Villagers in Torouf, and in Sahiya, which Business Insider also visited with the World Food Program this past September, give an idea of how the poorest people in one of the poorest places on Earth get by. On a stretch of highway about 20 minutes down the road from Torouf, dying millet stalks yellowed by dehydration sat within eyesight of a year-round lake. Irrigation is rudimentary or nonexistent. Villagers told Business Insider that this year, a nearby community had diverted the flow of water, threatening some of the villagers’ crops. Rainfall margins are so thin that any interruption to a local water system can have alarming consequences: For instance, some of the fields near Torouf are usually fed by a seasonal stream during the rainy season, which is connected to a simple irrigation system. "The country is always on the precipice of a failed harvest," Aaron Ashoff, the West Africa regional director for the American aid organization Samaritan's Purse, told Business Insider. And when the rains don’t fail, they can be dangerously inconsistent, coming in days-long torrents that wash away fields and villages - before disappearing for weeks or even months at a time. Over the past five decades, the three- to four-month-long rains have failed an average of once every two years in Torouf, and once out of five years nationally. Vehicles rarely stop there.Ī building in Torouf painted with educational images and slogans meant to teach villagers about proper sanitation. Animals wander dusty streets, and though power lines cross over the village, Torouf is virtually electricity-free.Īnd while it’s next to a major highway connecting Tahoa to the desert trading hub of Agadez - the so-called "uranium highway" through which the country's top mineral export is transited - there’s no market or even any roadside commerce. It’s a long 10 kilometers to the nearest secondary school. Situated in the border zone between Niger's agricultural south and desert north, Torouf is a dusty collection of rectangular buildings fashioned out of tan-colored mud its sturdiest structure is a mosque built by a Qatari charity. But there isn't a camp, or an active conflict, for hundreds of miles around. Food distributions like these are common sights in refugee camps. Staffers from a Nigerien relief organization wrapped measuring tape around the forearms of young children, to check if their limbs were thin enough to indicate malnutrition. Sacks of millet emblazoned with the logo of the United States Agency for International Development awaited villagers clutching yellow ration cards.
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