Building resilience in communities on the brink of disaster

Editor's Note: Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar joined the board of directors of Nuru International, a nonprofit organization, in 2014.

The sky blackened as locusts descended upon our small village on the border of the Sahel Desert. I was only weeks into my Peace Corps service in Burkina Faso, but for the Fulani people living there for generations, it was the worst devastation anyone had ever seen. Overnight all vegetation was gone. The combination of locusts and drought destroyed millet harvests and green pastures for livestock. This exacerbated an already food insecure situation for 1,000 people living on the edge of a growing desert.

My assignment to build a meeting room for a village savings club and teach bookkeeping quickly became absurd after the locusts came. All of the able-bodied men left with their cattle literally in search of greener pastures. Women, children and the elderly stayed behind. The village became a ghost town as the food security situation deteriorated. Poverty began to compound, as everyone who was left just tried to hold on.