Clean Water for 1,500 People in Rural Senegal

CREATE! is helping improve lives of rural communities in Senegal by providing access to clean abundant water, thanks to your generous support. We partnered with two new communities, Santhie and Wereyane in the last quarter of 2017, and with clean water available now, both the communities are advancing towards agricultural and economic self-sufficiency.

This path to self-sufficiency started with rehabilitation of existing wells in the communities. The CREATE! field technicians worked with community volunteers and local well diggers early this year to achieve that. Once the wells were working again, a solar pumping and irrigation system was installed that pumped the water to an elevated reservoir and from there to the agricultural fields. This meant no more pulling water out from the well by hand to irrigate the land. As Arame Diop, the president of the co-operative garden group in Wereyane points out, the reason the community had given up gardening before was because it had become too difficult to garden by pulling out water by hand from the well multiple times a day. Members of the gardening group in Santhie echoed similar stories. But now, with the solar pump working, the community has abundant water in their garden site to grow vegetables year-round.

CREATE! technicians have organized the community members into co-operative groups and have started training them on sustainable agricultural practices. Participants are learning how to prepare vegetable beds for planting seeds, how to properly water vegetables in different seasons as well as composting techniques to improve soil conditions. The communities are already producing six to seven varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables including tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, okra, melons, lettuce and turnips. They do not need to buy expensive vegetables from markets in Dahra and Linguere anymore to feed their families.

Access to water has also allowed the communities to embark upon a reforestation campaign, planting tree saplings that will provide their future generations with fruits, nuts, firewood and shade. More than 3000 saplings were planted this rainy season in each of the two communities.

With clean water readily available, the lives of the members of these two communities are being transformed. Awa Diop of Santhie sums it up perfectly when she says water is her favorite CREATE! program as “without water, we can’t do anything”.

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“For a long time the doctor advises to drink sweet water for my health and I used to buy it but since CREATE! arrival, I am able to have well water freely” says Fatou Ndiaye from the community of Walo, reinforcing the need for clean water for better health. She is just one of many women in the rural communities of Senegal who have benefitted from the clean and affordable water they can now collect from rehabilitated village wells, thanks to your generous support.

In a country where unpredictable rainfall brought about by climate change has led to drought like situations, access to abundant clean water year round not only means better health, but also the ability to cultivate food year round. In the community of Mboss for example, the availability of water from the rehabilitated well has resulted in previously barren land becoming a thriving vegetable garden in only one year. Women like Nogaye Faye of Mboss now have vegetables to eat daily from the garden. Many women in this community have now become vegetable sellers where previously they would buy from the nearby market. Women who had no work before have become entrepreneurs due to the community gardens made possible by clean water.

Nogaye, who previously was treated for hypertension due to the salty, brackish water she drank from the commercial source, believes that the clean water from the rehabilitated well has helped her health become better. And this water, according to her, has also helped the surrounding villages with all of them now able to grow vegetables without paying water bills.

The importance of rehabilitated wells for the provision of clean, abundant and affordable water is thus obvious. With your support, CREATE! is expanding our partnerships to new communities in Senegal for that purpose. In the last couple of months, CREATE! field technicians worked with community volunteers to rehabilitate an existing well and expects to rehabilitate another well in the coming months. By providing access to abundant, affordable water and training from CREATE! field technicians, we can work together to help these villages achieve agricultural and economic self-sufficiency.

CREATE! also helped communities in their reforestation efforts during the rainy months of July and August by planting trees for shade, firewood and food, something that would have been impossible without ongoing access to abundant water from rehabilitated wells to nourish growing tree seedlings. Want to know more about our tree planting campaign? Check out our blog.

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• Blog post on Tree Planting
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