Yacouba and Jadav: Foreign permaculturists?

I've been hearing tidbits about two men working independently in regenerative agriculture, Jadav Payeng and Yacouba Sawadogo. The first is from India, the second from Africa.

The more I read, the more I draw similarities between Sepp, Fukuoka, Sawadogo, and Payeng. All 4 are nature-observers working with the systems observed to create abundance, often in harsh or difficult areas. All 4 are "rebels" "nonconformists" or "seen as crazy at first". All 4 are successful on a broad scale. But sadly I hear very little about either of these two men past buzzfeed articles, some short youtube videos of interviews (often not in english), and two short documentaries, one about each. For example, searching these forums there are no results for either. I expect severe poverty, lack of internet, and language barrier are to blame.

I invite anyone here to look into these two if you haven't, because I feel like both could add a lot to the permaculture community if someone reached out to them.
Does anyone know more than I do about these two men? I am very interested in their stories.

I've heard of Jadav Payeng, and watched probably the same documentary as you. An amazing accomplishment. Got the impression he'd gotten a lot of good PR and empty praise from various levels of government, but not much in the way of tangible support from anyone, which is really unfortunate.


I just watched a followup to the documentary about Yacouba Sawadogo, and aside from the other similarities, this one certainly seems to apply here as well.


Hopefully someone else has more to add, I too would love to hear more about these people.


It seems likely to me that there are other people out there who have done amazing permaculturey things, who will never make it onto youtube or have a documentary made about them. Some of Geoff Lawton's videos show sites like this, but I found them to be a fairly superficial treatment of sites/people who probably have a lot more to teach than can come through that interface.