KARAN-MANAN, Mali — On his 5-acre farm of fledgling banana and orange trees, 38-year-old Lassina Keita has prepared a strong warning for his countrymen who are considering leaving Mali for Europe. But he said his words fall too often on deaf ears.

“I tell them to stay, that there is hope here, that they don’t have to risk their lives to go away so far,” said Mr. Keita, who speaks from experience.

As troubled Central American countries have provided the bulk of migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border in recent years, Mali and other African countries are supplying the pipeline of people trekking north in search of jobs and security in Europe. The outflow has sparked a sharp counterreaction inside the European Union.

Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries with two-thirds of its 18 million people younger than 25, has emerged in recent years as one of the leading countries of origin for migrants and asylum seekers landing in Europe.

The dangers refugees face on their journey north were on vivid display Thursday with reports that some 150 Europe-bound migrants, including women and children, drowned when their boats capsized shortly after setting sail from the Libyan coast. A top U.N. official described the shipwreck as “the worst Mediterranean tragedy” so far this year.

Three years ago, Mr. Keita was preparing to make the long overland desert trek to the Mediterranean coast of Libya, where he would try to find space on a boat to make the treacherous — often deadly — crossing to Italy or Spain.

Everything changed, Mr. Keita said, when he heard about a pilot development program that would give him training and some financial backing — all told an estimated $255, some it in the form of a loan he is repaying — to help get him start the farm he runs now.

He was skeptical, he said, but he gave it a try out of desperation.

Fast-forward to today, and Mr. Keita employs his half brother and another man from the community and may be on pace to take on another worker next year. He has set aside a corner of his farm to build a small house when he has more money.

On a hot July afternoon, Mr. Keita took time off from his labors to sit for a bit in the shade of a tree and speak about his experiences and his fears for fellow Malians determined to leave.

“I tell them, ‘Look at me. I’m like you, and I found a way. You can find a way, too,’” he said. “But a lot of them go anyway. They think they will have good luck, but you never hear about people having good luck.”

It can be easy to see why so many want to leave. Despite thousands of small-scale development projects sponsored by the United Nations, aid groups and individual donor countries, Mali’s economy shows little signs of dynamism.

The average Malian earns about $850 per year, according to the World Bank — 75 times less than the average American. In rural areas, income levels can be half of that.

A changing climate and limited water supplies have produced desertification, land degradation and drought. Life is even worse in the violence-ravaged northern two-thirds of the country, which the national government in Bamako has all but abandoned. Many northern regions lack police and schools and are considered too dangerous for aid organizations to operate.

“Personally, I’m a big fan of migration. Migration is good for the world,” said Gilbert Houngbo, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the U.N. agency that sponsored the program that helped Mr. Keita. “But it has to be voluntary migration.”

Mr. Houngbo was born poor in Togo, south of Mali on Africa’s Atlantic coast, and migrated to Canada for his studies. He earned Canadian citizenship before returning to Togo, where he was selected as his country’s prime minister, and later moved on to work for the United Nations.

He is now based in Rome, where a newly elected populist Italian government last year put Europe’s most draconian anti-migration policy into force.

“The problem is not migration per se,” Mr. Houngbo said. “With the right kind of migration, everybody wins. The problem comes when people feel they have no choice but to migrate because of fear of violence or persecution or poverty.”

It’s a vicious circle in the world’s poorest countries, including Mali. Poverty drives many of the most capable citizens to flee or, worse, pushes them into the hands of extremist groups.

Combined with other factors such as corruption, weak political institutions and mismanaged natural resources, the cycle can seem impossible to break.

“The first step has to be to create economic opportunity,” said Jean Claude Sidibe, a legal scholar who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was installed as Mali’s labor minister in May. “If there are jobs, then it makes it easier for the other problems to take care of themselves. But creating economic opportunity in a country like ours, that is not a small obstacle.”

Nothing proves that point better than the sheer number of aid projects working to lift Mali from poverty. The number of active development projects is not publicly available, but some estimates put the number in the thousands.

On a recent drive through rural roads in Mali’s southern regions, signs indicating some kind of aid project seemed to flash by every few minutes.

Yet the country is poorer in inflation-adjusted terms than it was a decade ago, according to the World Bank. Over the six-year period ending last year, Mali jumped from seventh place to third on the ranking of African countries of origin for migrants arriving in the European Union, according to figures from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.

Statistics may be the last thing factoring into the decision-making process of would-be migrants, but the numbers reflect a sense of hardship in Mali that has sent people fleeing at a growing rate.

“You try hard and work and work and work, but at a certain point you think you have to go,” said 28-year-old Namory Keita (no relation to Lassina Keita).

Namory Keita raises chickens for their eggs, a business set up with help from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

He left Mali for Libya when he was 23 but returned after his money was stolen. Like many other aid beneficiaries, he turned to local development programs when he ran out of options.

“Nobody wants to leave their family, but what choice do most of us have?” he asked. “I have done well. I’m lucky. I’m thankful. But for every person like me, there are 20 people, 50 people, more, people who have no options.”

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