154 – Fuma Gaskyia and Human Urine Fertiliser

[00:00:06] David: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my privilege today to be here with Aminou, a longtime collaborator and friend from Niger.

Aminou, welcome to the IDEMS podcast.

[00:00:22] Aminou: Okay, thank you David.

[00:00:24] David: You are the director of Fuma Gaskiya. Do you want to start by telling us what Fuma Gaskiya is?

[00:00:31] Aminou: Okay. Fuma Gaskiya is a farmer federation that is composed of a union and farmers groups. So Fuma Gaskiya was created in 2002 with nine union, 88 farmer groups and 5,600 members. Today’s farm Fuma Gaskiya has 24 units, 320 farmers group, and we have 21 504 farmers, out of them 55% are women.

[00:01:00] David: 21,000 farmers. 50% women. Even since I last heard the numbers, you’ve grown.

[00:01:07] Aminou: Yeah. The number was grown.

[00:01:09] David: Wonderful. When I got involved in the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, formerly the Collaborative Crops Research Program, your project stood out amongst all the projects because it was a research grant held by a farmer federation.

[00:01:30] Aminou: Yeah.

[00:01:31] David: This is since 2012. Do you want to tell us about that grant?

[00:01:35] Aminou: Yeah, we gave the grant in 2012, but before the grant, we had been collaborators of CCRP, at that time, project. That collaboration that we get some experience, and the McKnight worker said she saw that we are doing in the project, our contribution, the farmer contribution. So they said why we cannot maybe give them an opportunity to be leader of one project.

So we started in 2012. At that beginning we invite some researchers to help us to come and build the project, so define the objective activities, so at the end one of the researcher ask me who will be the PI of the project. So one of the researcher tell them who invite you at this meeting, he said, that is Aminou that invite me. So he said that Aminou is the PI of the project. So when we leave the hall, that researcher quickly send an email to McKnight Foundation submitting the proposal. So McKnight ask them, who invite you to submit the project?

So at that beginning we start getting challenge, how maybe you can involve researchers in our project? Because at the first time, researcher invite farmers to help them collaborate together. But now is the farmer to ask the researcher to come help them in the collaboration. So that was difficult to get. So we get some researcher that accepted to accompany us in our research program. So we started in 2012, today, 2025, so you see we have many years of experience conducting activities.

[00:03:10] David: You’ve told that story in a way which I love because this challenge of the power dynamics between the researchers and the farmer federations was very real in your context, and very personal, almost in this aspect that some researchers felt they couldn’t possibly be on a research grant led by a farmer federation, to the extent that, as I understand it, when the grant was originally given, the research organization was initially excluded. Is that right? Because the researchers said, if we are not leading it, we don’t want to be part of it.

[00:03:46] Aminou: Yeah.

[00:03:47] David: And luckily, the representatives said, okay, if you don’t want to be part of it, then you won’t be part of it. And they were very strong on enabling you to have that first research grant. And I joined shortly after that. It was around 2014. You had done your first year of trials. And I still remember the workshop where we were looking at the data. There were some challenges with that data.

[00:04:13] Aminou: Yeah. At the beginning we have a strong challenge with the data. Because when we collect the data, we conducted the analysis, we couldn’t find what we’re expecting to get. So the result are not, the graph are not, we cannot interpret them. We are not able to come out with some explanation. So when we go back and discuss it with the farmers, how maybe we can solve the problem. Is at that period that we think it’s possible, maybe you can increase the size of the parcel.

[00:04:45] David: The field size.

[00:04:46] Aminou: The field size.

[00:04:46] David: This is a wonderful example because actually, if I remember right, there were two stages to this. The first stage, we simplified the design and then the results were there, but they weren’t clear. Then we increased the field size. You were coming to the end of your first grant, and you weren’t sure whether there was going to be another one at this point. And so that third and final year with your experiments we were both very relieved, because this was your Oga trial, which is human urine, and there’s a whole story behind that. But, what happened then once you increased the field size?

[00:05:24] Aminou: Yeah. When we increased the field size we started to do the farmer typology. So maybe it will help us in the interpretation of some results. When we increase the size of the plot, what we obtain, we have some differences even in the plot, because the last effect of the Oga that we apply on the part of the field. So the second year when we apply Oga, we find that the crop are very strong. They’re very strong, we have a crop, they give more yield compared to the other part of the plots.

[00:05:57] David: Let me just repeat this, beautiful, I mean, some of your farmers redid the experiment in exactly the same place as the previous year, but they increased the plot size. And what was visible to the human eye was you had the line where on one side you had the control and on the other side you had the human urine treatment. And even within the human urine treatment, you could see visibly the difference between the part of the field, which had had two years of treatment and the part of the field that only had one year of treatment.

And this is where I remember you saying how convincing this was to the farmers. That not only is there a difference between the treatment and no treatment, but it gets bigger year on year, you are actually building the soil fertility.

[00:06:51] Aminou: Yeah.

[00:06:52] David: And this is now, this particular piece of work. Maybe you need to tell the story about why Oga is Oga. Why isn’t it human urine?

[00:07:02] Aminou: Yeah, the story of Oga is very long because before we started utilizing Oga as fertilizer, so we carry out some survey with the farmer, we discuss it to them, focus group. So on social aspect, cultural aspect, because we ask the question, maybe you as a farmer when we ask you to collect your urine and apply it to the crop and consume the product, are you ready to do it?

Some say no, they cannot manipulate, they cannot do it. So there is one woman in the general assembly, she ask that man that said no, why you are not convinced to use your urine, human being urine as fertilizer and consume the crop. He said that because it’s a waste, he cannot manipulate it.

Then she relate to him. You have your field that is close to the village where you and everybody, everyone of the village go and defecate there and urinate in the field. And that field is the best one. So you harvest the product and consume it. Why you cannot collect your own urine and apply it to the field?

So it’s that period that some farmers started thinking, ah, this urine really is a fertilizer because they’re convinced, well, the field as close to the farmer, to the village, are the best one in yield. This is why, because they receive urine, human urine there. So when we carry that experience in the other village, we face the problem of a cultural aspect, because in that village people is very not good when you talk about urine in the public.

So people are just looking at you, they will not say anything to you. So there’s one technician that asking me, you are talking to urine and these people did not say anything to you. Did you remark it? I say yes, I remark it because in this village, people are not saying urine in public.

So when I returned in my village, I asked the group of farmers, this is the challenge that we face. Today, we are aware that the urine technology, but there are some farmers and they’re not talking about urine in public. So how we are going to do? So there’s one woman that said we can change the name. So he said, what name do you propose? He said, Oga. Oga means the boss, the boss of the fertilizer. Why a boss? Because there are no costs. So you can collect free and apply it and get good yield.

So from that time farmer said, Oga is the human urine collected and applied to the field as fertilizer. But when you said human being urine, it mean the waste that you leave in the toilet.

[00:09:37] David: You also went to religious groups to check that this was acceptable. You went to scientific groups to check that the health implications were fine. At the beginning it was a really, really trying some time because your project was called Women’s Fields and what you were looking for was something the women would be able to apply, even though they don’t have access to the finances to be able to buy or to bring in any…

[00:10:07] Aminou: Chemical fertilizer.

[00:10:08] David: Chemical or other fertilizer.

We need to get back to the fact that in this third year, the final year of your initial grant, once you increased the plot sizes, now had the farmer typology, suddenly the results were clear. You know, the data you had was fantastic. Some of the most convincing on-farm trials I’ve ever seen, where you just got amazing results coming out in the data very clearly. You had the qualitative data from the farmers talking about how clear the effects were to them and wonderful, wonderful data.

This is now being published, one of your colleagues has worked with you and published this. And that basically meant you were now able to apply for a second phase.

[00:11:04] Aminou: Yeah.

[00:11:06] David: Do you want to tell us very briefly, at this point Oga had some scientific backing to it, you were going to the second phase, what was it you wanted to do in that second phase at that point? Now you had that evidence, I remember how happy you were at that point, but you now had challenges.

[00:11:24] Aminou: So at the second phase, our challenge have more, two basic challenges. The first one, our farmers demand to increase the trial so that we can reach many village and many farmers. And the second challenge, if we increase the number of farmers, how we are going to deal with the data, how we can collect the data? Because it is another challenge. So we are working with maybe 200 farmer when we increase to 1000, it’ll be a big challenge to handle the data.

So at that period we think about to develop one application, owned by farmers, to help the farmer to collect the data easily. So we started at the first year of the second grant and developing one…

[00:12:14] David: Just before you started, I remember being part of that interview process. It was incredible. You were able to recruit a computer scientist, MSc in computer science, having a wonderful CV, to come to the farmer federation to build this application with and for you. It was incredible.

[00:12:34] Aminou: So the application were built at the beginning. First farmers, they said that they want to register their organization, register their name, and they register their plots. So we did this first activity with that application. And we started also collecting the field data. At that first year, we increase our number of trial from 200 to 1,700. So we registered 1,700 farmers with the application, we collected the data and try to see at the end how the data look like in the application when we export them in Excel for the analysis.

[00:13:15] David: I still remember seeing that data and just being blown away by it. It was wonderful data. 1,700 farmers doing this comparative experiment. And again, like the previous year, the results were so clear. And I have vivid memories, ’cause we actually spent a long time working on that data together, of the fact that not only were the results clear, but they were showing consistent results across different villages, different contexts.

You had some villages which were clearly wealthy because everyone was getting large yield and other villages, which were clearly struggling ’cause everyone was getting small yields. But in all of these different contexts, you were getting the same result that Oga was having, you know, an increase in the yield of about 300 kilograms per hectare. Is that right?

[00:14:07] Aminou: 30% increase.

[00:14:09] David: Well, it depended on the context because there were some places where you had large yields, but it was a constant increase in most places. And it was phenomenal data. And this data, you then, let’s fast forward to now. Now how many farmers are doing the trials? The trials are no longer just on Oga, they’re on a whole variety of different things. How many farmers did the trial last year?

[00:14:34] Aminou: So the farmers that are conducted trial, when we take Oga itself, this year, 2024 campaign, we have something like 12,000 farmers that conducted the trial. And all the data had been collected through that application. Even now there are farmers that are trained, how they can collect their own data and send it in the application. And most of these years data have been collected by farmers, they help them to collect most of the data. So I think 60% of this 12,000 data have been collected by individual farmers and some farmer related help others to collect the data.

[00:15:11] David: Yeah, these are the extension people that you have from the unions.

[00:15:14] Aminou: And I think even apart of Oga, we have some project that are using our application for data collection like CATHI Gao, is doing that, is collecting data from our application.

[00:15:27] David: Absolutely. There’s a number of other research projects that now use your technology and your farmer infrastructure to do research. It’s incredible.

One of the things which I want to just understand a bit better as well is Oga itself in the Maradi region has now taken on a life of its own. There’s a market in Oga. People are selling it.

[00:15:52] Aminou: Yeah, in Maradi, I think, four to five years past, people are convinced with the result obtained from Oga on the field. So now they started using it, and started collecting it, storing it, and selling it. So we have some young farmers that are now engaged in the business of collecting and selling Oga.

So I think in 2001 or 2002, one can of Oga 125 liters was sale at 500 CFA. But this year the same container was sale at 3000 CFA. So increase of 2500 CFA.

[00:16:33] David: Wow.

[00:16:33] Aminou: Even with that price maybe we have a rupture of Oga, we cannot get it at the time.

[00:16:39] David: But let’s just put this into perspective for a second. This is human urine, which previously in the region was, in certain contexts, unacceptable to even talk about this as a fertilizer. Within less than 10 years this was already being sold at 500 CFA, which corresponds to about $7, $7-$8. And that now has had an increase of 600%, so it’s sort of now six times the price it was or so increase of 500%. And so this is incredible.

This is something where this is now being used not just by women’s fields. This is being used by all sectors of society and it is truly impacting the fertility of the systems.

[00:17:37] Aminou: Yeah, because what make this increase in the price of Oga? A part of what you said, many people are using it today. But we have another utility of Oga. Oga was used now as a fertilizer and a bio pesticide to treat some insect on cowpea season. So instead of buying a chemical product to treat insects, so now farmers are using Oga to treat the insect.

[00:18:05] David: There was a story I’ve heard, which I think you should tell about a lady who had a special way of getting children to give her, to increase her supply.

[00:18:16] Aminou: Yeah, yeah. So ladies in the compound, they developed their own strategy to have a, to collect more Oga. They ask to the children that are in the compound, so if you do pee in the can, they will give you candy. So a strategy that they call pee for candy. So even the children from all the compound, they come and urinate in that can to receive the candy.

[00:18:45] David: A candy for pee. Wonderful.

And this change is really significant in all sorts of ways because it’s not just, again, it’s not just increased the fertility, it’s not just increased the productivity. It’s also been something which as I understand it, has enabled particularly certain women’s groups, which was the initial aim, to have access to fertilizer for their field.

Can you just say a little bit more about this and what your experiences of this with the original intention?

[00:19:18] Aminou: Yeah, at the beginning, I think women, they are the one that were concerned to the project, because they don’t have enough resources to purchase fertilizer. And even if you have animal manure, they don’t have infrastructure to transport it to the field.

But we develop that technology for women. But today, what the men see are the effect of that fertilizer to the crop. Men are engaged. Even they’re the one that are doing business with Oga. So now, at the beginning, I think our trial, most of our trial are a hundred percent are women that are conducting the trial. But now out of those 12,000 farmers, 40% of them are men. Only 60 are women.

[00:19:59] David: Well, 60% is still well over 6,000 women involved in actually using this and experimenting with this. It’s just incredible.

I’m conscious we are coming to the end of this episode. There’s so much more we could talk about. I do want to just dig into this element of power relations. We talked at the beginning about how the power relations with the researchers were sometimes difficult. You weren’t accepted as being the leaders of the research project. Has that changed? I know it may not have changed with everyone, but do you feel that different or that change in the power relation?

[00:20:41] Aminou: Yeah, the power relation, if the researchers are changed. I think today we have from many researchers that are convinced with what we’re doing, national and international researchers are convinced because what they see as a result and the data that we’re gathering, they said that Fuma is working, is doing a wonderful job.

So I think today’s many researchers are converging to Fuma Gaskiya to collect data, do some analysis, and something. And even each year, some students are being sent to Fuma to be trained and do their thesis with, Fuma Gaskiya in our field. I think some of these results had been presented in the universities and some researchers that are in national institution to convince some researchers that to change their mentality instead of looking farmers, just beneficiary, farmers, they have knowledge and they can do many things that will help research to increase.

[00:21:37] David: Let’s articulate just how game changing this is. Before, if you were a researcher and you wanted to work with Fuma’s farmers, you’d almost certainly start by having to do a baseline survey to understand the farmers you are working with. But if a researcher comes to you now, do they need to do that baseline survey?

[00:22:00] Aminou: No, they don’t need to do baseline survey because most of the information, they get it from Fuma. And this information are being updated by Fuma each year. Because if you take, for example, farmer typology, the farmer typology there, any farmer can have access to his own data. At each moment when something change, you can upload it in the application.

And also we conduct some farmer, I think, household characterization that will help some researcher to have some basic information about the exploitation. So they don’t need even to do the household survey to get some result. I think really they can get it.

[00:22:37] David: I cannot tell you how important this is. Of course, Niger, there aren’t so many international research projects and so on because it’s a country which has been neglected. But I’ve done a lot of work in Kenya and I can tell you the farmers got really tired of telling the researchers the same questions again and again, because the different researchers would keep getting sent to the same farmers and the farmer would say, I just told your colleague in your institution this last week, you know, can’t you talk to each other?

And now that problem has gone away. Your farmers, they’re only being asked for information, which is new, which is relevant, which is where they are being respected as part of the research process. This is huge. This is transformative in terms of actually looking at how research can and should be done.

And I have been inspired and I’ve talked in a number of different forms about the issues of data ownership, and I’ve just been so inspired by what you have created. You’ve changed the paradigm of research by having the data owned by the farmer federation itself as a research partner, and it’s so sensible. So it’s, it is wonderful.

Let’s finish this episode, and we can do another episode on some of the other aspects of your work. But let’s finish it by just this story, this journey you’ve been on, where you’ve started being, as you put it, part of the beneficiaries. You took charge of a research project, and you had to fight for your rights to do so. And now you are highly respected as a research partner, not just as an individual, but as a federation of farmers.

Can you articulate what that journey has meant for you and for the federation?

[00:24:54] Aminou: So that journey, what I will say about it, is a journey that help our organization and our farmer to see many things on that journey, and understand now what was happening in the research program. And also this journey help farmers to know that today they’re very important in the research. They’re not just beneficiary, but part of the research and they can contribute more in the research.

So even that journey, help us maybe today to farmer to be more aware of what is happening in the research program. They can even change at every time. If something happened, they can even change or influence some research activities and become owner of the research product.

Because when we compare of the previous year, researchers are working alone without farmers. The end product, they bring it to the farmers and both farmer leave the end product, they’re not using it. But today, if you compare what is happening, the research product that had been made or obtained with the farmers, now if you go, you can get it in the hand of farmer. They’re using it.

So the ownership of the research product. This is what is some changes that happen at the farmers level and the farmers organization. And today, farmers organization, they’re well considered by research institution because what a research institution is doing now, they are conscious that they cannot do it without those farmer federation because those farmer federations, they have power. They have many things that researchers will use from them, so to gain and maybe to develop the research program.

[00:26:46] David: Wonderful. And we still haven’t talked about how you’ve institutionalized these processes. We’ve not talked about some of the elements of actually the research itself and some of the ways you’ve conceptualized the typology. We need to have another episode. I hope you don’t mind. I’ll make sure we find another time and we keep this discussion going.

[00:27:08] Aminou: Thank you.

[00:27:09] David: Thank you. This has been really wonderful.