MISSION SPOTLIGHT: AFGHANISTAN
In this section:
Achieving Stability in Senegal Hinges on Building
Peace in Casamance Region
Farmers Learn New Production Methods
Religious Leaders Spread Word on Health Issues
Education Quality, Enrollment Rises in Senegal
Achieving Stability in Senegal Hinges on Building Peace
in Casamance Region
DAKAR, Senegal—Senegal is counting on its political
stability in a volatile region, and its sound investment climate,
to speed up economic growth and reduce poverty among the country’s
11 million people.
However, if the population keeps growing at its current
2.6 percent rate, the economy will have to grow at a 7.5 percent
rate over a decade to cut poverty rates in half.
USAID’s $33.5 million budget for 2006 in Senegal will
cover activities in economic growth, health, education, and
peacebuilding in the southern Casamance region.
“Senegal stands out among countries in West Africa
because of its political stability and leadership in African
affairs,” said Mission Director Oliver Carduner. “But
it also must work to build investor confidence through greater
transparency in its procurement systems, its judiciary, and
its customs service.
“Our ability to address democracy and governance issues
effectively is key to the success of all our programs.”
For example, USAID/Senegal is working to ensure that health
committees publicly disclose how clinics spend their budgets
and that timber cutting rights are awarded fairly and openly.
USAID is also working with the Senegalese government to
address governance issues in the southern Casamance region,
which—while the country’s most fertile area—is
caught up in a 23-year separatist rebellion. Both sides of
the conflict have asked the mission to support peacebuilding
activities, such as training in negotiation skills needed
to get peace negotiations on track. Since 2000, USAID has
assisted people living in and returning to the Casamance.
The mission helped create more than 6,500 jobs. It built homes,
classrooms, and local health facilities. According to Carduner,
without lasting peace in the Casamance, Senegal’s “drive
for development is likely to falter.”
Richard Nyberg of USAID/Senegal wrote this collection
of articles.
Farmers Learn New Production Methods
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Left to right, Ellen Samura, Sira Samura, and Meta
Camara pound the nutritious fonio grain in Boula Téné,
a village of 200 people. USAID/Senegal works to improve
fonio processing, saving time and increasing profits
for a small export industry mostly driven by women.
Richard Nyberg, USAID/Senegal
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KOUSSANAR, Senegal—Beating a quick rhythm, three
women raise enormous pestles over their heads and drive them
with a heavy thud into mortars full of fonio grains. It will
take more than three hours to pound, winnow, and wash three
kilograms of fonio.
This scene is common in Senegal’s southeastern Tambacounda
region, home to about 530,000 people, most of whom are subsistence
farmers and cattle or goat herders. Fonio is a common crop
here that thrives even in the area’s poor soil. But fonio,
similar to couscous, is also increasingly sought after as
a regional delicacy.
It is often served with a peanut sauce or chicken stew.
Rich in amino acids and gluten free, it is easy to digest
and low in natural sugars, making it an ideal food for the
sick or diabetic.
With support from USAID/Senegal, farming communities like
the one in Kousanar are working together to boost production
and meet growing demand. Local farmers are even trying to
export to new specialty markets in Europe and the United States.
Since 2003, a five-year, $11.75 million project in the southern
half of Senegal has organized a network of fonio farmers to
increase production and improve fonio processing.
Last September, for instance, USAID supplied a farmers’
network at Dindéfelo, near the country’s southern
border, with a machine to separate the grain from its hull.
Adama Awa Suwaré, president of the committee in charge
of the machine, said: “It used to take me five hours
to transform three kilograms of fonio. With the machine, it
only takes five minutes.”
USAID is working with more than 2,000 producer groups and
family enterprises. Aside from fonio, the Agency supports
projects related to karaya gum for use in the pharmaceutical
industry, local fruits like jujube and madd, and honey.
In Koussanar, a town of about 2,000 people that lies 30
miles west of the regional capital, Tambacounda, dozens of
groups harvest karaya gum, baobab fruit, jujube, and fonio.
Brought together by USAID-funded efforts, these communities
work with local administrative and national forest department
officials to establish rules governing the use of the forested
areas, and set up fines for damaging vines and trees or setting
bushfires.
In late January, USAID trained 64 men chosen by their local
development committees in 31 villages in the Koussanar area
as forest guards. They now enforce the local forest code that
was drafted with the help of the USAID project’s team.
Koussanar is the seventh community where USAID has worked
alongside residents and authorities to draft local conventions
on resource use.
“A key objective is to get community members working
with local and national authorities so they can develop forest
management plans,” said Peter Trenchard of USAID/Senegal.
“This will provide them the legal basis to manage and
profit from the products in a sustainable manner.”
Exports of karaya gum more than tripled last year to over
140 tons, with an increase in revenue of 430 percent. Likewise,
production of a lucrative “instant” baobab powder
for juice increased from about a quarter ton in 2004 to 5.5
tons in 2005.
Religious Leaders Spread Word on Health Issues
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Imam Habib Thiam, second from right, explains to members
of the religious community in Kaffrine, Senegal, that
Islam supports women’s health and a healthy family
life.
Richard Nyberg, USAID/Senegal
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KAFFRINE, Senegal—Imam Habib Thiam looks up
as another Muslim community leader from across town enters
his room to discuss a woman’s medical problem that kept
him up all night.
Women’s health has become more of an issue to Thiam,
who has decided to take life-saving messages to the mosque.
Thiam is just one imam who is talking to his community about
health issues since participating in a USAID-funded workshop
last November. Now he often addresses health issues affecting
women at public gatherings like weddings, funerals, baptisms,
prayers, and religious holidays.
Thiam discovered through the USAID workshop that some 15,000
Senegalese mothers were likely to die between 2001 and 2007,
many of them young girls who bleed to death giving birth because
of poor medical care.
“This is 10 times the number of people who drowned
on the Joola ferry,” he said, referring to a ferry that
sank off the Atlantic coast in 2002 and is considered the
greatest national tragedy in living memory. “I don’t
even dare contemplate the magnitude of it.”
The day after the meeting, the imam preached at the mosque
next to his home, bringing in a nurse from the nearest health
post to discuss the importance of birth spacing and maternal
health issues.
USAID has invested about $120,000 in efforts to inform religious
leaders of reproductive health issues and the risks of HIV/AIDS.
This includes printing information kits in Arabic and the
most widely spoken local language, Wolof, outlining what Islam
says about birth spacing.
More than 90 percent of Senegalese are Muslim; about 5 percent
are Christian.
“Islam forces no one to have a dozen children,”
said Bashir Niass, Arabic teacher at the Waldiodio Ndiaye
High School in Kaolack and regional coordinator of the local
USAID-assisted Islam and Population Network. “Marriage
in Islam is conditional. If you have the means, you can get
married. At a minimum, you must have a small house and enough
money to support your wife and your children,” he said.
“Islam does not reject birth spacing,” added Niass,
who accompanies the USAID team during presentations to religious
communities. “Everyone knows that birth spacing is a
necessity now.”
Religious leaders are also urging their congregation members
to be in faithful relationships in order to avoid infectious
diseases.
“It’s not the condom that is bad—it is wrong
to have sex outside marriage,” said Abdou Aziz Kébé,
an Islamic scholar with the Islam and Population Network.
Preliminary results from a USAID-supported demographic and
health survey last year put national contraceptive prevalence
rate at 10 percent—indicating limited access to family
planning services.
Last year the Agency supported reproductive health dialogue
sessions with more than 30,000 people, focusing on fidelity
and women’s rights, and the number and spacing of children.
USAID also supported 600 sessions on reproductive health issues
using a lifeskills manual. These sessions were attended by
nearly 6,000 youth, more than half of them women.
The Agency has worked with 3,500 religious youth leaders,
who were issued faith-based life skills manuals in Arabic.
“The religious nature of our lifeskills training has
greater impact,” said Louise-Anne Ciss, a Catholic member
of the Coalition of Religious Youth Organizations against
HIV/AIDS. “We have to communicate with religious youth
on the basis of faith. During the training, some people didn’t
believe HIV/AIDS existed. Now they do.”
Education Quality, Enrollment Rises in Senegal
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Sana Ly, a girls’ scholarship recipient, looks
over her notes in the new middle school classroom financed
by USAID in the rural community of Maka.
Richard Nyberg, USAID/Senegal
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MAKA, Senegal—Sana Ly walks 30 minutes from
her home in Colibantan to her new middle school in the nearby
village of Maka. Although the distance is a hike, Ly and her
friends in this dusty, rural area of southeastern Senegal
consider themselves lucky to be able to carry on their studies.
Elementary school is the highest available education level
for many children in Senegal, where public schools are a rare
sight in rural areas. Many parents cannot afford to send their
children to school in nearby cities, so teenagers often work
on family farms instead of going to school.
A five-year, $20 million education program is increasing
middle school enrollment and improving the quality of education.
It is assisting the Senegalese government with its goal to
provide each child at least 10 years of education.
Social pressures to leave school are particularly intense
for young girls in communities like Maka. By the time they
reach Ly’s age, 17, they could be married and possibly
pregnant. Parents in rural areas often do not support girls’
desire for education. At Ly’s school, for example, there
are currently 121 students: 91 boys and only 30 girls.
“We are trying to make the parents aware of the need
to send their girls to school,” said principal Pape Djibril
Bathily. “But in a farming community like this one, working
the soil brings economic capital.”
More than a quarter of Senegalese girls will never learn
to read or write, and only 16 percent of teachers in Senegal
are women. Some of them, like their male counterparts, still
instruct under trees.
But USAID is helping improve education conditions. With
communities contributing one-fourth of the overall costs such
as electricity, construction material, water, and labor, USAID
has helped build 18 schools and rehabilitated eight others
in Senegal’s Fatick, Kolda, and Tambacounda regions for
use during the 2005–06 academic year.
Each new school includes four classrooms, a library, a science
laboratory, a computer room, a principal’s office, a
room for teachers, and separate bathrooms for girls and boys.
Built in rural areas, these schools helped increase enrollment
by 28 percent last year.
USAID is also offering scholarships to help girls earn an
education. Ly is one of 1,000 young girls from three regions
to benefit from a scholarship under the Africa Education Initiative
(AEI), a U.S. Presidential Initiative.
Through a public-private partnership with SONATEL, Senegal’s
major telecommunications company, another 100 scholarships
were awarded to poor high school girls.
Additional Agency projects have printed new textbooks and
trained teachers how to better engage their students. School
principals have also been helped to better manage their schools.
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