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Paper short abstract:

Connections between rural and urban Chad are growing, leading to the commodification of what used to be common resources. This is impacting labour conditions and the citizenship rights of rural workers. Development policies aimed at empowering rural workers in the market reinforce these dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

Chad is at the centre of turbulent transformations. While much attention is being paid to social instability, violent rebellions, and the climatic transformations that are impacting the country, working conditions in rural areas have only been marginally explored. The growing commodification of land and the dependence of rural workers on markets are impacting working conditions, building on the precarity already created by demographic growth and climate change. Access to basic resources such as water and land becomes more competitive in rural areas, while the growing urban centres attract seasonal migration without offering stable incomes. Building on a year of fieldwork in the province of Guéra and various visits to N’Djamena, this paper explores the efforts of development aid to “empower” rural workers through various strategies (horticulture, cereal storage, transhumance paths, capacity-building, etc.) and the trajectories of these actors in their seasonal migration to urban centres, mainly Guéra’s capital Mongo and Chad’s capital N’Djamena. The paper argues that urban and rural contexts are intertwined today and that most interventions aimed at empowering rural workers by reinforcing their capacities to act on the market – mainly aimed at urban consumption – are contributing to the commodification of goods and resources generally shared in common in rural areas. This might temporarily increase their revenues, but it makes their access to common goods as citizens more difficult. By increasing competition and commodifying goods, these policies are simultaneously creating precarious workers and vulnerable citizens in a growingly strong urban-rural nexus.