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Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at an agricultural project in Ouallam in Niger: skilful staging
Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa
The women are amazed, laugh and clap their hands.
A German foreign minister who plays a porter for a moment, the cane over her shoulder, plastic buckets dangling from ropes at both ends.
Inside is a melon, which is grown here in a field.
Annalena Baerbock takes a few steps, grimaces, she feels the burden, the heat is unbearable, over 40 degrees.
Then she takes off, laughs and the women beam with her.
Baerbock thanks the women: »Merci«.
The photographers have their motif, the motif of a skilful self-portrayal by a German foreign minister.
Then it's back to the motorcade, into the privilege of air-conditioned cars.
For a moment, the Green politician could physically feel what women do here every day: hard work.
In the midst of a climate that is changing, that is becoming more merciless.
The trip to Ouallam, around an hour and a half by car from the capital Niamey, takes the Foreign Minister straight into the climate crisis.
Here in Niger, as she has been told in many conversations, it has long been a reality.
But the consequences are unequally distributed.
"The climate crisis affects us all, but not all equally," she will say later.
Niger, more than three times the size of Germany, is the second stop on their journey to West Africa.
She had previously spent two days in neighboring Mali, including visiting the German army camp in Gao and promising a continuation of the Minusma mission, which is intended to create security in the north-east of the country against jihadist terrorists (read more here).
So now she is in neighboring Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, from Wednesday to Friday morning.
The data situation is breathtakingly frightening: the highest birth rate in the world, women give birth to an average of 6.8 children, in 15 to 20 years the current 24 million population will have doubled.
Despite its problems, the country with its many ethnic groups is currently considered relatively stable compared to its neighbors.
Visit under the highest security
The country looks dry, the rain is falling more and more irregularly.
Around 25 kilometers from Ouallam, the minister's heavily guarded motorcade stopped at an erosion site.
The Nigerien soldiers spread out on the surrounding hills, a group of them, masked and behind sunglasses, sitting in an open Toyota pickup by the road.
Maximum security for Baerbock in a country that has been terrorized by jihadist fighters for years, including the Ouallam region on the border with Mali and Burkina Faso.
Over the reddish earth, the view falls into the distance, isolated trees can be made out in the shimmering heat.
Baerbock looks out over the landscape, while Matthias Banzhaf from the Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) explains the effects of erosion to the minister.
Agriculture used to be practiced on the plateau near Tolbokoye, where the minister is standing.
Now everything is bare.
The upper floor has been removed, leaving a hard crust of laterite, an iron conglomerate, through which water hardly penetrates.
This in turn means that the water flows like a torrent into the plain and severely erodes the earth there.
The prospects that Banzhaf spreads to the minister sound bleak: Heavy and shorter rains are being recorded more and more frequently, and the start of the rainy season has been postponed.
"By the end of the century, the temperature in Niger will have risen by five degrees," says the GIZ employee finally to Baerbock.
The minister is silent, letting it sink in for now.
speech at the university
On the day of her arrival in Niger, the Greens politician made climate change the central issue in a lecture at the Abdou Moumouni University in front of 140 students from 15 African countries.
Even here in the room, despite the fans on the ceiling and cooling devices, there was an oppressive heat.
While the guests from Europe got water, the student listeners drank nothing.
It is the time of Ramadan, and most believers do not eat anything until evening.
But the religious rule is also becoming an increasing problem in times of climate change.
Baerbock chooses an elegant way to do this.
"You'll have to explain to me again afterwards how you manage not to drink during Ramadan," she says.
The audience is enthralled, laughing and applauding as the French translation follows over the headphones.
Here, in front of young climate researchers from Africa, the Foreign Minister intoned key messages.
"A storm of distress and crises" is sweeping across the people of the Sahel.
It's no longer just about containment, but about adapting to the climate crisis.
Baerbock advertises in Niger for the expansion of solar energy, which is an "incredible potential".
But the expansion of solar energy is such a thing in a country that is hardly electrified, which covers the power supply from a diesel power plant like in Gorou-Banda.
So Baerbock's appeal looks like it's from the desired program of your Green Party.
Ukraine and the consequences for Africa
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a constant companion of their journey.
The war in Europe has direct consequences for the export of fertilizer and grain from Ukraine and Russia to Africa, there are already supply bottlenecks, prices are rising.
According to the local GIZ, six million people in Niger are threatened by starvation.
The "traces of suffering" in Ukraine "reach deep into the global South," says Baerbock.
The international community must face up to this responsibility.
The war in Ukraine "must not and will not lead us to turn away from the other crises," she promises.
The country's problems are omnipresent, the poverty in the cities and in the country visible during the journey: as in Mali, Niger is suffocating from the ubiquitous plastic waste.
Even in the countryside, plastic bags are scattered widely, black and white dots in the landscape, like memorials.
Camels only seem like a reminder of another, distant Africa that must have existed before the triumph of plastic – the animals near Ouallam, for example, graze among the rubbish.
education as a challenge
Poverty is the visible side.
It goes hand in hand with the low level of education in large parts of the population.
Head of state Mohamed Bazoum, whom Baerbock is meeting in the capital, as well as Foreign Minister Massoudou Hassoumi, is considered a politician who values the expansion of education and wants to promote girls and women.
The longer girls go to school, the greater the chance that they will not become pregnant at an early age.
But in a country with such a rapid population explosion, the endeavor to improve knowledge through education, including about contraception, is almost an impossibility, as local diplomats concede: the government could not build so many schools and have classes set up, how every year young people follow.
During a visit to a settlement for refugees near Ouallam, the minister experienced that Niger is a young country.
Here, with the help of GIZ and the UN agency UNHCR, local people, internally displaced persons and Malian refugees live together.
400 houses for an average of seven family residents each have been built.
"No wood, no wood," as a UNHCR employee says.
The buildings are made of clay, cement and water, so the outside temperatures can cool down a bit.
What is special about the project, emphasizes the German ambassador in Niger, Hermann Nicolai, is the government in Niamey's efforts not to settle the refugees at the country's external borders, but here in the country.
"Out of the realization that most refugees will stay anyway," he says.
One challenge is the integration of former nomads.
Abdull Aziz-Ali, for example, is the spokesman for the internally displaced persons.
In 2019 they came to Ouallam, only with their animals, he says: »Bandits came to our place and plundered us«.
There is hardly any grazing land due to the local plant cultivation, which initially created problems, but "no serious conflicts," he adds to be on the safe side.
A spokesman for the Malian refugees, an elderly man with a turban, is "very, very grateful" to the state of Niger for taking them in: "Now we're on the way to settling down," the interpreter translates.
What that means in concrete terms is shown by a number on the school board: 32 out of 100 students – including 68 girls – are missing. The head of the school explains why:
Many parents of former nomadic families have not yet recognized the value of education.
But progress has been made, also in terms of the proportion of girls in school.
In another classroom, Baerbock writes her name and age on the blackboard;
»Annalena 41« is written there.
Later she is surrounded by clusters of children as she walks through the settlement.
The minister bends down, the children keep asking her name.
"Annalena," says Baerbock, herself a mother of two.
"Annalena," repeat some of the children.
"And what's your name?" the minister asks back.
Finally, there is a meeting with local dignitaries in nearby Ouallam itself.
Baerbock then stands in the courtyard and gives a short press conference.
You have to experience what temperatures "of 50 degrees" mean, she says.
On her trip to Africa she had heard over and over again: »Please don't forget us«.
Here, in Ouallam, Baerbock makes a promise.
"We see and we hear you." International aid, she says, must be "significantly increased in the next few weeks in order to avoid famine."