En Route to the World Social Forum with the West African Caravan

By late July 2026, the buses that had been rolling across the Sahel and along the Atlantic coast for more than two weeks finally converged in Lomé. Peasant farmers from Mali and Burkina Faso, fisherwomen from Guinea, youth environmental activists from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, trade unionists, pastoralists, and informal workers from Senegal – over three hundred people in total, from several West African countries – filled the city’s public squares and university halls with songs, testimony, and political debate. They had not come simply to travel. They had come to build a movement.

The West African Caravan for the Right to Land, Water and Peasant Seeds is now in its fifth edition, having first set out in 2016 under the banner of the Global Convergence of Struggles for Land and Water – West Africa (CGLTE-OA). This year’s journey – ten days across two parallel routes, a Sahelian axis running through Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and a Coastal axis crossing Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, both converging in Lomé before continuing to Cotonou – coincides with the 17th World Social Forum (WSF), which West Africa is hosting for the second time. The timing is not incidental. The Caravan is the mobilization.

Traveling School and Political Process

“The Caravan has two main objectives,” says Massa, spokesperson of the CGLTE-OA. “First, it strengthens regional integration among peoples. Second, it defends the rights of the most vulnerable communities – those whose lives and livelihoods depend on land, water, forests, and other natural resources.” Those communities, across Africa, are the more than eighty percent of the population who depend on family farming, pastoralism, fishing, and forest management for their survival. They are also the communities most exposed to land grabbing, climate disruption, extractivist investment, and the slow dismantling of customary resource governance.

This year’s journey coincides with the 17th World Social Forum (WSF), which West Africa is hosting for the first time. The timing is not incidental. The Caravan is the mobilization.

What distinguishes the caravan from a conference or a summit is its methodology. It moves. In every country it traverses, it stops in villages and cities to hold popular conferences, visit agroecological farms, meet local chiefs and prefects, organise cultural events, and present advocacy documents to government authorities. This year, the caravan carries the Livret Vert – the Green Book – a compilation of community-developed policy proposals on land governance, water management, agroecology, seed sovereignty, and farmer-pastoralist relations. Each stop produces concrete recommendations addressed to local and national authorities. The caravan, in other words, is not a protest march. It is a travelling school and a political process simultaneously.

Hidden Impacts, Connected Issues

The communities it encounters are contending with crises that rarely appear in macro-economic data. In Ghana, Ado – a founding member of the Convergence and technical adviser to Senegalese municipalities – described what caravan participants witnessed along the coast: “Entire villages have been displaced as the sea has swallowed more than 2,000 houses. The affected communities shared their daily struggles, including the loss of livelihoods.” Fishermen cannot work because debris left by coastal erosion traps their nets. Women in fish processing have lost their markets. The state has provided no meaningful relocation programme. These realities – invisible to carbon accounting and GDP figures – are precisely what the Caravan is designed to surface and connect.

“Entire villages have been displaced as the sea has swallowed more than 2,000 houses. The affected communities shared their daily struggles, including the loss of livelihoods.”

That connection reaches beyond the local. In Lomé’s public forums, discussions moved between coastal erosion, Sahelian desertification, seed privatization, and the creeping southward spread of farmer-pastoralist conflicts. “The governance of natural resources is under serious threat,” Massa argues. “Even our seeds are being threatened. The spread of genetically modified seeds raises concerns that peasant farmers may eventually lose control over their own seed systems and agricultural heritage.” For the Convergence, land, water, and seeds are not separate issues – they constitute an integrated commons whose fragmentation is the product of a coherent political project that communities must resist with equal coherence.

Crossing Divides, Uniting Struggles

Among the Caravan’s most politically significant additions this edition is the prominent role of women from the informal economy. In Dakar, the caravan was joined by Ramata, General Secretary of the FSI (Women of the Informal Sector) in Senegal, whose participation reflects a deepening of the movement’s analysis. Informal workers – market traders, domestic workers, street vendors, small-scale food processors – are overwhelmingly women, and their economic precarity is structurally linked to the dispossession happening in rural areas. When land is grabbed in the Sahel, it is often women’s subsistence plots that disappear first. When rivers dry up or become polluted, it is women who walk further for water and women who lose the small-scale fish processing that feeds their families. The FSI’s presence on the caravan – and the Convergence’s ongoing work to federate an Union of Women of the Informal Sector across West Africa – reflects a politics that refuses to separate rural land struggles from urban labour precarity. The struggle for social justice, in this framework, crosses the rural-urban divide.

“When we arrive at the World Social Forum, we do not come empty-handed. We come with concrete proposals, practical experiences, and the collective knowledge gathered from communities across the region.”

This convergence of struggles is precisely what the WSF is meant to amplify. “Air travel is expensive,” Ado observes plainly, explaining why the Caravan serves a dual function: it is both mobilization and transit. “The Forum also creates opportunities to exchange experiences with organizations from Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and many other regions. It is an important space for networking, building alliances, sharing experiences, and developing common strategies.” For the Convergence, the Forum is not an end point — it is a staging ground. The Caravan arrives in Cotonou carrying not just delegates but reports, testimony, community declarations, and a manifesto crafted throughout the journey. As Massa puts it: “When we arrive at the World Social Forum, we do not come empty-handed. We come with concrete proposals, practical experiences, and the collective knowledge gathered from communities across the region.”

The Right to Define the Future

That knowledge – and the insistence that communities possess it – is what makes the Caravan politically irreducible. In an era of algorithmic governance, technocratic climate solutions, carbon market false promises, and shrinking civic space across the Sahel, the Caravan asserts something stubbornly elementary: that the people most affected by the crises have both the right and the capacity to define the solutions. “The future of Africa should not be defined only by those whom we elect to govern us,” Massa says. “The continent’s stability, development, and future also depend on its communities. They are the true foundation of Africa, and their voices must be heard.”

In an era of algorithmic governance, technocratic climate solutions, carbon market false promises, and shrinking civic space across the Sahel, the Caravan asserts something stubbornly elementary: that the people most affected by the crises have both the right and the capacity to define the solutions.

As the caravan completes its final leg to Cotonou, this is the argument it carries forward. Not a petition but a practice. Not a demand for inclusion but a demonstration of what inclusion, built from below, actually looks like – across sixteen countries, five hundred people, and ten years of a movement that has never stopped moving.