ECOS Burkina Faso is based in Ouagadougou. The association works in a place where two emergencies overlap: land growing poorer year after year, and thousands of families displaced by the security crisis. It chose not to treat them separately, because on the ground they are not separate.
The first strand is the land. The desert is advancing, soils are losing their fertility, and the country has launched a national reforestation effort, the Green Belt. ECOS Burkina Faso contributes at its own scale: growing forest and fruit seedlings suited to the local climate, then organising planting days with schools and neighbourhoods. The aim is not only to put trees back in the ground. It is also that a child who planted one looks at it differently ten years later.
The second strand answers a more immediate question: how do you keep farming when land is scarce and water is running short? The association trains growers, women and young people in greenhouse and soil-free cultivation. These methods save water, shield harvests from bad weather and make year-round production possible on small plots, in town as well as in the countryside. For a family, that means an income no longer riding entirely on a single season.
The third strand is human. The humanitarian situation remains heavy, and many families arrive with nothing in neighbourhoods already under strain. ECOS Burkina Faso provides concrete support — food, essential kits — but focuses above all on what comes after the emergency: creating occasions to meet, such as Kaya Nooma, where displaced families and host communities encounter one another somewhere other than a distribution queue.
Under the presidency of Ibrahima Koné, the association holds these three strands together. Planting, producing, welcoming: three ways of saying that a territory cannot be repaired one piece at a time.
