Opening New Routes to Community-Led Development in Northern Guinea
It’s not much to
look at - at first glance. It doesn’t photograph well from any
angle. A workmanlike fusion of girders, tie rods and gravel wrapped
in a concrete mold, the bridge over the Kouregnaki River in the far
northern reaches of Guinea’s Fouta Djallon Mountains is a
streamlined study in architectural understatement, a modest monument
to utility that joins two rocky stretches of road at a quiet rural
juncture 30 kilometers south of the Senegal border.
But Ibrahim Sory
Souaré, 64, sees the bridge from a different perspective – a point
of view shaped by a lifetime spent tilling the soils of Guinea’s
remote Lansa and Badiar regions – and his assessment of the
Kouregnaki span suggests that there is more to the structure than meets the eye.
“Ce
pont est la vie,”
Souaré says. “That bridge is life.”
When
he was a younger man,
Souaré worked for
the Government of Guinea as an agricultural extension officer. From
1962 through the 1980s, he helped transform food production in Lansa and Badiar by teaching farming families how to diversify their
cultivation of fonio and other millets
with a mixture of potatoes, maize, beans, peppers, and tomatoes. The
new crops dramatically improved food yields and enhanced diet
balance. And the introduction of potatoes, which kept well in
storage and could be transported over long distances, gave the region’s
farmers something they had never had: a cash crop that they could
sell in bulk to distant consumers.
But
a major obstacle blocked the farmers of Lansa and Badiar from
tapping the income-generating potential of their new harvest. What
they needed was a hungry urban market that would buy their surplus
at a good price, and that market, the bustling town of Kédougou in
neighboring Senegal – a major point of sale to cities stretching all
the way to Dakar – was located just 80 kilometers to the north. Yet
Kédougou also stood on the wrong side of a river that had no bridge,
and the only viable route to Senegal was a rough mountain bypass
that meandered 250 kilometers to the south and east before crossing
the border. At that distance, transport costs were prohibitive, and
hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs were effectively cut off from
economic opportunity.
This situation
changed in 2001 when representatives of the Center for Development
Support (CAD),
ADF’s Guinea partner organization, approached local community
leaders with a proposal to help them identify and address their most
critical social infrastructure needs. ADF and CAD had recently
helped the Government of Guinea and the World Bank create an
effective participatory development model for Guinea’s new Village
Support Program (PACV),
and the Foundation had agreed to expand its role as a facilitator of
rural infrastructure development by entering into a participating
agency service agreement (PASA) with the United States Agency for
International Development in Guinea (USAID-Guinea).
The
agreement proposed to target US $1.25 million in funding provided by
ADF ($750,000) and USAID-Guinea ($500,000) to a new series of
projects in two designated “pockets of poverty’ – remote rural areas
with limited resource access. Surveys conducted by the World Bank
and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) had identified 12
areas of Guinea that had not benefited from either
government or donor intervention, and the PASA was directed toward
enhancing Guinea’s efforts to decentralize its economic development
programs, enhance local capacity-building initiatives, and provide
demand-driven infrastructure where it was most needed.
Based on their experiences in implementing other participatory
development projects in Guinea (see
“A School for Development in Bady”
in this issue), CAD’s staff fully expected that the “pocket of
poverty” program in Lansa and Badiar would take some time to get off
the ground. The process of creating effective community forums where
different groups could openly debate local development needs had required careful negotiations with local leaders and
multiple meetings with diverse constituencies. Moreover, CAD’s
program directors knew that local communities were divided by a
history of ethnic tensions between Foulah, Bassari, and Djankanké
villages. This situation had generated serious concerns about the
viability of a participatory development approach in Fouta Djallon.
Mamadi Kourouma and Fode Keita of CAD were thus surprised to find
that consensus, not conflict, greeted them when they arrived to
explain the goals of the project. Men and women; children and
elders; Foulahs, Bassaris and Djankankés all agreed that the first
order of business for their new project was to build a bridge to
Kédougou.
Local leaders put aside their differences to get the project moving
as quickly as possible. One elderly Foulah chief stood before a
mixed meeting of Foulah and Bassari residents and noted that the
assembly marked the first time in his lifetime that the groups had
come together. He then asked the residents of his village to “to
join hands [with Bassaris] in an effort to develop our community.”
At another meeting, two villages whose members had shunned contact
with one another following a tragic murder agreed to work together
to collect sand and gravel for the new span.
The
weeks that followed ADF’s approval of bridge construction plan were
filled with activity as people worked long days to put a new
bridge in place before the next harvest. A civil engineer was hired
to design the span, and local residents provided the bulk of the
labor required to complete construction of a structure whose final
cost was less than US $60,000.
Today, local residents near the bridge have grown accustomed to
watching the daily express to Kédougou, laden with people and
produce, rumble out of the hills and across the Kouregnaki bridge. The
transports return in the evenings with essential goods purchased in
Senegal and sellers whose pockets are lined with cash. Ibrahim Sory
Souaré has embarked on a second career as the head of a thriving
potato growers’ cooperative whose 700 members sell 60 percent of
their produce to Senegalese buyers. Individual farmers now earn
enough income to send their children to school, and local
entrepreneurs are investing in small businesses that have
transformed the upland villages of Lebekerin, Touba, and Madina Wora
into vibrant local market centers.
The
success of the “pocket of poverty” project in Lansa and Badiar has
helped confirm one of the ADF’s guiding principles: that African
communities are filled with local development experts who know what
their greatest needs are, and, if given the opportunity to take a
central role in decision-making, will invest their own time,
creativity and energy in efforts to build a stronger future for
themselves and their families. The Lansa and Badiar program has also
shown that a participatory development approach is often the most
direct and cost-effective way to implement projects that address
real and immediate needs.
Over
the past three years, the success of the bridge-building project has
carried over into the construction of new schools, rural health
centers, and clean wells through cooperative efforts undertaken by
neighbors who have chosen to embrace the opportunities of the
present over differences of the past. And by facilitating close
cooperation among communities across Lansa
and Badiar, CAD and ADF have helped create broad-based institutions
for participatory development that have the power to bridge old
divides and provide a dynamic framework for sustainable growth at
the local level.
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Photo 1 (above): Ibrahim Sory Souaré,
the head of a local potato growers' cooperative in the Lansa-Badiar
region of northern Guinea, sees seeds for economic revival in the
construction of the bridge to
Kédougou.
Photos 2-4 (below):
Through its support for demand-driven bridge construction and road
rehabilitation in three of Guinea's 12 designated "pockets of
poverty," ADF has helped hundreds of farming families generate new
income streams.
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Photos 5 and 6 (below): The revival of the upland community market
at Madina Wora demonstrates the impact of the new bridge to
Kédougou.
In photo 6, a money changer buys and sells Senegalese CFA and Guinea
Francs at the Madina Wora market.
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