Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known as “the man who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionising agricultural methods and creating a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African country.
Against the odds, facing the encroaching Sahara, he built a forest in Burkina Faso, becoming “a national hero” and winning acclaim abroad for his innovations.
At the opening of the Fifth Climate Chance Africa Conference (CCHA) on Housing and Urban Development in Yaoundé on 23 October 2023, participants from all continents clearly grasped the urgent need to develop synergies to help achieve the 11th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG11) on sustainable cities. In this interview, four high-level speakers analyse the housing crisis and climate hazards, as well as the financing solutions that these issues entail. They are Ronan Dantec, French senator and chairman of the Climate Chance association, Augustin Tamba, mayor of Yaoundé 7 and chairman of the United Councils and Cities of Cameroon (UCCC), Luc Gnacadja, former environment minister of Benin, and Stéphanie Njiomo, ambassador of the Global Compact for the Environment in Cameroon and Central Africa.