The research, conducted by Abdou Ka of the Department of Sociology at Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor, draws on approximately thirty semi-structured interviews carried out between October 2021 and June 2022 in the communes of Mboula, Téssékère, Louguéré Thioly, and Oudalaye. Respondents included herders, school-going youth, teachers, livestock experts, and local officials, interviewed in Pulaar and analyzed through combined thematic and conceptual analysis. The findings challenge a long-standing image of Sahelian pastoral society as closed, isolated, and impervious to state institutions—a picture the author argues has obscured the profound social transformations now reshaping the region from within.

Historically, the Fulani of the Ferlo have never been as static as the stereotype suggests. French colonial administrators drilled boreholes across the zone in an effort to settle transhumant herders, permanently water points that radically altered pastoral lifestyles, shortened transhumance routes, and introduced monetized exchange. But it was the great drought of the 1970s—striking Upper Volta, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Chad—that respondents themselves describe as the foundational rupture in their biographies. Some families lost entire herds and migrated to urban centers or neighboring countries; others relocated to Saloum and Casamance in search of pasture. The crisis diversified livelihoods, strengthened the presence of the state and NGOs, and shifted pastoral society, in the words of interviewees, from political autonomy toward market dependence.

Against this backdrop, the aspirations of educated youth emerge as a powerful engine of change. A nineteen-year-old student in Téssékère told the researcher he wants to become a doctor not for personal advancement but to serve his own community, whose patients must currently travel to Dahra or Dakar for care. He leads a student association campaigning in surrounding villages to persuade Fulani families to enroll their children, describing education as the only path to developing the community. A young woman training in catering in Ranérou-Ferlo dreams of opening her own business, noting the striking absence of modern food offerings in the area. Another young volunteer with an NGO specializing in local milk processing envisions processing units in Dakar that would carry livestock products into urban markets—explicitly assigning educated youth the role of bearers of this sectoral renewal.

Yet these aspirations collide with formidable structural obstacles. The most consistently cited barrier across interviews was the seasonal mismatch between the school calendar, which runs from October to July, and the major transhumance period from February to July, when many parents pull children out of class to accompany herds in search of pasture and water. One teacher in Téssékère-Forage estimated that roughly ten percent of his students go on transhumance with their parents every year despite his awareness-raising efforts. Physical distance compounds the problem: schools offering a complete cycle cluster in administrative centers and large villages with boreholes, while camps three to fifteen kilometers away often rely on makeshift multigrade classrooms. A seventeen-year-old student in Mboula reported that many pupils drop out as early as primary school because of the daily travel distances involved.

Parental skepticism adds a further layer. Families weigh a decade or more of study against uncertain returns, and the region offers few visible success models. One sixty-two-year-old herdsman in Widou Thiengoly recounted the story of a friend’s daughter who excelled through primary school, middle school, high school, and university in Dakar, only to return to the village without finding work. National statistics underscore the depth of the exclusion: completion rates for the first cycle of secondary education in Senegal stand at just 43.2 percent for girls and 34.5 percent for boys, with pastoral areas performing well below the national average. Across the wider Sahelian belt, a World Bank feasibility study suggests roughly 97 percent of nomadic children remain outside formal schooling systems.

Perhaps the most striking paradox documented in the study concerns traditional ecological knowledge. Pastoral knowledge—herd management, animal pharmacopoeia, transhumance practices, inter-community relationships—is transmitted informally in the daily life of camps and has underpinned Fulani resilience for centuries. Schooling, by removing children from these learning spaces, threatens this transmission. Yet the families investing most heavily in education are often those with the largest herds, and therefore the most to lose if family labor turns away from livestock. An animal husbandry engineer in Mbeuleukhé observed bluntly that students no longer accept herding duties, preferring civil service careers, so that today it is largely those outside school who tend the region’s livestock. A global review of 288 scientific studies cited in the article found that of 63 papers explicitly documenting knowledge transition, 52 reported a decline in pastoral traditional ecological knowledge, with formal schooling, sociocultural change, and market integration as the main drivers.

But the Ferlo data also reveal inventive forms of hybridization that resist any simple tradition-versus-modernity narrative. In one village founded in 1922 by the marabout Thierno Koyli, Quranic education, livestock farming, and agriculture have always been articulated together; a municipal agent there described disciples who revise the Quran and Sharia under trees while tending cattle in the bush. Pioneer families in the 1980s literally relocated their camps more than fifteen kilometers to be near the school in Widou Thiengoly, treating education as a diversification strategy comparable to other economic adaptations. The Mobile Training Units piloted under the regional PRAPS program in Mali offer a promising template, bringing training in improved livestock techniques, natural resource management, and product processing directly into pastoralists’ living and working spaces—though the approach remains limited in reach and is not yet integrated into Senegal’s formal education system.

Gender emerges as a structuring dimension of these negotiations. While young men frame their aspirations in terms of professional achievement and community leadership, with mobility largely taken for granted, young women more often articulate their projects around constraints on their movement. Families restrict girls’ mobility in the name of protection against a public space perceived as masculine and dangerous, hindering migration projects the young women themselves consider realistic. Regional programs such as SWEDD have demonstrated that scholarships, transport support, and safe spaces can achieve secondary school retention rates of up to 96 percent among beneficiaries, but pastoral areas are often the last to benefit. Since Senegal’s 2010 gender parity law, women now hold half of municipal council seats—a formal involvement that had no precedent in the study area before.

The study’s implications point toward a genuinely situated education policy: adapting school calendars to transhumance cycles, enriching curricula with pastoral and ecological knowledge, developing vocational training grounded in livestock production and agribusiness, and scaling targeted measures for girls’ schooling. The author cautions that the thirty-interview sample, drawn through snowball sampling from four communes, is illustrative rather than representative, and that broader claims about knowledge loss and household risk management remain hypotheses for future comparative research. Still, the central finding stands out with unusual clarity for a debate often framed in binary terms: pastoral families in the Senegalese Sahel are neither rejecting school nor abandoning herding, but stitching the two together with remarkable agility—and the question of how the next fully educated generation will lead pastoralism may reveal not its decline, but the springs of its adaptation.

Subject of Research: How Fulani pastoral families in the Senegalese Sahel negotiate formal schooling alongside transhumance, traditional knowledge transmission, and aspirations toward modernity

Article Title: School and pastoralism in the Senegalese Sahel: tensions, adaptations, and social transformations

Article References: School and pastoralism in the Senegalese Sahel: tensions, adaptations, and social transformations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16908

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16908

Keywords: pastoralism, Fulani, Senegal, Sahel, education, transhumance, Ferlo, traditional ecological knowledge, gender equality, school policy, social transformation, rural migration