Ousmane Touré

Ousmane Touré is a project manager in agroforestry and entrepreneurship at ABK-S. With a master’s degree in biodiversity and natural resource management, he brings his skills in agroforestry and market gardening to bear on the association’s projects on a daily basis, as well as his ingenuity and resourcefulness. One day, Ousmane and his colleagues were faced with a problem of inadequate seed storage. The storage granaries had been abandoned by the farmers. After questioning them, they realized that the granaries posed structural risks and that snakes loved to take refuge there. Together, they developed an original solution by mixing repellent plant leaves into a layer of clay. This system, which allows the granaries to be sealed tightly and keeps unwanted animals at bay, was so successful that it was presented at the 2019 Climate Initiatives Awards and will also be shared at an upcoming collaborative workshop in Togo. To further strengthen his skills and fill the gaps he has identified, Ousmane began a master’s degree in Paris in September entitled “From Agronomy to Agroecology.” We took advantage of his visit to our offices to interview him.

Although he quickly realized that the case studies and research methods proposed were more oriented towards northern cropping systems than expected, transposing and adapting this knowledge to Senegalese conditions proved to be a motivating challenge. New skills in research, biological regulation, and the design of sustainable cropping methods and systems have opened up a better and broader vision of agroecology. He now understands the mechanisms of plant association, which he had previously reproduced empirically. His new skills, combined with a better contextual analysis of soils and cropping systems, will enable him to propose more effective agroecological arrangements in the future.

After completing his master’s degree, Ousmane will return to Senegal to finalize and support the projects he has set up over the long term because, in his view, it takes several years to achieve concrete changes and results. On a personal level, he hopes to one day acquire a farm where he can develop his own techniques and set up a free training center to share his knowledge with as many people as possible.

The projects