He has a few spots in mind but needs to gather more information before embarking on the weeks-long journey.
In the Sahel, climate change has translated into more frequent, longer drought spells that threaten the resilience capacity of nomadic livestock pastoralists like Adoum.
Freshwater points are scarce during the dry season and many animals are at risk of dying before reaching the next oasis.
When droughts occur, herders can cover several hundred to thousands of kilometres before finding an adequate water spot with enough water and vegetation to meet the needs of the many herds gathering there.
He is also a founding member of the African Network of Pastoralists, Bilital Maroobé.
Thanks to mobile phones, this information is literally at their fingertips.
Adoum is one of 21,000 pastoralists who use the Garbal mobile phone service to find where the best conditions are to move their herd.
The Sustainable Technology Adaptation for Mali’s Pastoralistsproject isn’t your typical public-private partnership.
The Netherlands, via Hoefsloot Spatial Solutions, provides the satellite imagery, Orange Mali operates the call centre and TASSAGHT, with its team of local pastoralists, collects and sends up-to-date information to complement the data coming from space.
“The first phase of the project closed in December 2018, but given its success, we are now looking to expand the service to other regions in Mali and beyond, and add services of relevance to pastoralists such as animal health counselling and digital financial products.” “Water scarcity is one of the most pressing challenges we are facing today, and ensuring access to abundant, safe, clean water sources is a great challenge, particularly in arid and semi-arid environments,” says Lis Mullin Bernhardt, freshwater expert at UN Environment.

United Nations agencies have urged greater international support to stave off severe food insecurity in Africa’s western Sahel; a region reeling from the effects of conflict and now threatened by drought and rising hunger.
In normal weather conditions, supplies would last beyond June, into September.
“Those are telling signs of a looming disaster that the world cannot continue to ignore.” It is feared the region’s children will be the worst affected, with more than 1.6 million at risk of severe acute malnutrition this year – representing a 50 per cent increase compared with the last major nutrition crisis in the Sahel, in 2012.
Marie-Pierre Poirier, the Regional Director for West and Central Africa at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that it was “tragic that the same mothers are coming back to the clinics year after year with their children for treatment.” It is tragic that the same mothers are coming back to the clinics year after year with their children for treatment of severe acute malnutrition — UNICEF official Marie-Pierre Poirier This year, the numbers have been the worst, she added.
Strengthening resilience is also the top priority for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“What will help stabilize the Sahel is support for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, during this lean season and in the future, to cope with shocks that include climate change and conflicts,” said Coumba Sow, the Sub-Regional Coordinator for Resilience for FAO across the region.
They have also prepared longer-term interventions, including improving access to local food resources as well as strengthening health and social services to allow communities and countries at large, to prevent and deal with similar shocks in the future.
Implementing these programmes however, relies on sufficient funding.
Fully funded, the WFP response (requiring $284 million) will provide food and nutrition to some 3.5 million people.
UNICEF’s response ($264 million) will protect almost 1 million children from severe acute malnutrition and provide them access to water and sanitation facilities and education until the end of the year.

Senegalese ‘miracle grain’ could see Sahel prosper: TED.
Pierre Thiam, one of Africa’s best-known chefs, told the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania on Monday night of his dream to see "fonio" turn around the fortunes of the arid Sahel region which stretches just south of the Sahara The grain is a nutty-tasting cross between couscous and quinoa which has been cultivated on the continent for some 5,000 years.
He discovered it was once so popular it was found in Egyptian tombs, accompanying people to the afterlife, and that Mali’s ethnic Dogon people believe the entire universe sprung from a grain of fonio.
Now however, it is only produced in the western part of the Sahel in places like Kedougou, one of the poorest regions of Senegal.
"Desertification and lack of job prospects means much of the youth have left, they choose the deadly path of migration in search of better opportunities," said Thiam "This is the reality of Kedougou and much of the Sahel today.
It thrives where nothing else will grow."
– Tiny grain, big answers – And he rapped the "colonial mentality" that had made the Senegalese believe their own products were inferior — enjoying rice imported from China and baguettes and croissants from France while believing their home-grown grain was for "country people".
"Africa has a chance to lead the world by creating a new path to modernity.
The biggest challenges facing the world over the next 20 years are already playing out in Africa," said conference curator Emeka Okafor.
These range from food security to creating millions of jobs in an increasingly automated world, redesigning cities, water scarcity and the fight against climate change.

Drought-tolerant species thrive despite returning rains in the Sahel.
Following the devastating droughts in the 70s and 80s in the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert, vegetation has now recovered.
What surprise the researchers is that although it is now raining more and has become greener, it is particularly the more drought resistant species that thrive instead of the tree and shrub vegetation that has long been characteristic of the area.
This shows that the recent regreening of the Sahel region can not only be explained by the fact that it rains more, which until now has been the dominant explanation.
By, for example, examining what people in the area use different trees and shrubs for and look at how the landscape changes, we can better understand how land use, social change, climate and ecosystems interact, even in ways that can be unexpected," says Lowe Börjeson, Associate Professor at the Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University.
The study suggests that an understanding of how human use of the landscape interact with climate and ecosystem processes is important for organizations that want to develop strategies for climate change adaptation, biodiversity conservation and local development in one of the world’s poorest regions.
The Sahel extends east from the Atlantic Ocean through northern Senegal, southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Niger, northeastern Nigeria, Chad and the Sudan.
The recurrent droughts in the 1970s and 1980s had disastrous consequences for agriculture, livestock and the environment in the area, with widespread ​​famine as a result.
The drought in the region also gave rise to a global discussion and concern for desertification as an emerging environmental problem.
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Summer rainfall in vulnerable African region can be predicted.
Summer rainfall in one of the world’s most drought-prone regions can now be predicted months or years in advance, climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of Exeter say.
The Sahel region of Africa — a strip across the southern edge of the Sahara from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea — is a semi-arid landscape between the desert to the north and the savannah to the south.
The new research used the Met Office Hadley Centre’s Decadal Prediction System and found that the model was good at predicting summer Sahel rainfall over the forthcoming five years.
Forecasting years ahead relies on sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic, whereas the El Niño Southern Oscillation is important for a shorter-term forecast before each summer.
"Our study suggests that skilful predictions of summer rainfall in the Sahel are now possible months or even years ahead," said Dr Katy Sheen, formerly of the Met Office but now of the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
"With a population reliant on agriculture, the Sahel is particularly vulnerable to major droughts, such as those of the 1970s and 1980s.
"Improved understanding and predictions of summer rainfall in the Sahel has the potential to help decision makers better anticipate future cycles of summer droughts and floods, helping local communities become increasingly resilient to the region’s notoriously variable and changing climate."
"Our study improves our understanding of the driving mechanisms of summer rainfall variability and shows they are predictable," Dr Sheen added.
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