By Paulomi Bhattacharyya | Development Associate and Project Leader
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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