By Kaitlyn Grigsby-Hall | CREATE! Grants Manager
The end of the annual, three-month rainy season in October can mean hardship for rural Senegalese families, many of whom do not have access to adequate water or agricultural knowledge to grow crops year-round. With your support, hundreds of women and their families in CREATE!’s 13 partner communities no longer face this challenge. By providing access to abundant, affordable water and training from CREATE! field technicians, we are helping these villages achieve agricultural and economic self-sufficiency.
Thanks to this training, cooperative members continue to harvest a rich variety of vegetables throughout the year – not just during the rainy season. Cooperative members learn to grow vegetables that are commonly eaten in rural communities, including eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes. The community of Back Samba Dior, which just partnered with CREATE! in December 2016, harvested over 2,700 pounds of eggplants during the month of October!
Before CREATE! partnered with her community, Sokhna would buy vegetables from the town of Gossas, and then resell them in her village. This meant her profits were usually small and she often did not have enough vegetables to feed her own family. Now, however, Sokhna grows her own vegetables in the community cooperative garden, and has enough to both feed her family and sell the surplus on the market. “Since we have the vegetable garden in our village, my family eats more vegetables than before, and I have noticed an improvement in their health,” says Sokhna. Most notably, she says, “there is no longer child malnutrition in our community.”
There are other communities in rural Senegal without access to abundant and affordable water. With your continued support, we can help families in these villages gain new agricultural skills and economic livelihoods, made possible through solar-powered water pumps and gravity-fed irrigation systems in cooperative gardens. Your donations make a difference!
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