Formation et migration de la main-d’oeuvre rurale en Afrique. L'expérience du Club des jeunes agriculteurs d'Ayou, un projetpilote au Dahomey/Bénin (1967-1975)[Training and migration of rural labor in Africa. The experience of the Ayou Young Farmers Club, a pilot project in Dahomey / Benin (1967-1975)]

An integral part of a multidisciplinary research project on Development Aid and its consequences in Africa, this contribution analyzes the experience of training young out-of-school farmers in the village of Ayou (present-day Commune of Allada, Republic of Benin) as part of a development support project funded by FAO and also supported by the US Peace Corps and German volunteers from 1967. If the introduction of young people to modern methods and techniques of agriculture was a success, the integration of end-of-cycle learners into the peasant working life was confronted with an unprecedented peasant agriculture crisis due to the vagaries of the weather and which coincided with the oil boom in Nigeria. In this context, most of the trained youths left the village to sell lottery tickets in Cotonou or to serve as laborers in the cocoa plantations of southern Nigeria. The realities described seem still relevant and allow us to understand the psychology of rural populations. They also make it possible to understand the logic which bases the migrations of the countryside towards the urban centers. Indeed, the problems of rural exodus still persist today. The work highlights the ability of rural populations to innovate and self-destruct, especially in the context of poorly thought out and misguided survival strategies.