By Kaitlyn Grigsby-Hall | CREATE! Grants Manager & Project Leader
With your support, CREATE! is changing the lives of hundreds of women and their families in rural Senegal. By providing access to abundant water and training from CREATE! field technicians, rural communities can advance towards achieving agricultural and economic self-sufficiency.
In January and February, CREATE! field technicians worked with community volunteers to rehabilitate existing wells and install solar-powered water pumps and gravity-fed irrigation systems in the Back Samba Dior and Keur Daouda garden sites. Now that access to clean, abundant, and affordable water is secured in these communities, CREATE!’s field team is transitioning to the next stage of our partnership with these villages.
In both communities, technicians have organized residents into cooperative groups and initiated training and mobilization activities. Cooperative members now know how to create seedling nurseries and sow seeds. They can also build planting beds and transplant vegetable seedlings. Participants are also learning how to properly water vegetable plants and how to use compost to improve soil productivity. Over the next several months, field technicians will continue to work with cooperative members to strengthen and expand these agricultural skills.
Cooperatives in Back Samba Dior and Keur Daouda are learning how to grow a variety of vegetables commonly eaten in Senegal, including lettuce, okra, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, and peppers. In just a few weeks, cooperative members will begin to harvest these vegetables to sell and to consume at home, helping to ensure that families in these villages have secure access to healthy food.
Access to abundant, clean water and training in vegetable cultivation has transformed the lives of women in CREATE! partner villages. Ndeye of Diender, who lives in a big household with her children and grandchildren, says, “Before CREATE!, I had no purpose. There was nothing for me to do at home. Now, I work at the garden site every day. I feel useful again.” Ndeye believes that Diender has fundamentally changed since the community partnered with CREATE! six years ago. She says, “I have seen the work of many NGOs in Senegal, but CREATE! is the best.”
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