Coumba Dady KA is fighting for positive change in Senegal through the creation of polyvalent gardens with fellow women. The garden’s final goal is to ensure food diet diversification and increased financial autonomy thanks to the engagement of these women.
The polyvalent gardens are parallel projects to the great green wall project in order to combat desertification. These gardens were set up and are managed in consultation with the women living in the villages across the Great Green Wall. These determined women have formed various Economic Interest Groups. The aim of these gardens is to allow the cultivation of fruits and vegetables throughout the year, to provide food security to different villages across the Great Green Wall.
These gardens should provide enough food for self-consumption as well as enabling villagers to diversify their diet. Moreover, they have the possibility to sell their surplus crops at weekly markets. This initiative thus enables women to achieve a new social and financial autonomy, as well as to develop their expertise in agriculture.
In a Sahelian environment where desertification and climate change are accentuated by human activities. Lack of water, economic difficulties, food poverty and geographical isolation are the main (and not negligible) difficulties faced by the women and men of the Senegalese Sahelian territories.
The multi-purpose gardens have enabled the production of fruits and vegetables and of course, their consumption within households. This has allowed, therefore, unprecedented food diversification within the villages of the Senegalese Sahel. In addition, the surplus fruit and vegetables produced are sold at local markets by the women who manage the gardens, thus enabling the creation of a new cash economy previously non-existent in the area. This gives these women a new financial and social autonomy. As Ms Coumba Dady KA said in November 2019 during an interview:
“If I take our diet as an example, it has improved considerably after the harvest [of Widou’s multi-purpose garden], because we eat fresh produce. […] I think it’s good for your health. Economically too, many women have been able to create economic activities from the tontine system (community micro-credit) that we had initiated with the proceeds from the sales of market garden produce.”
There are currently nine multi-purpose gardens in Senegal located along the Great Green Wall. The Widou Thiengoly multi-purpose garden is the one managed by the carrier of this project: Ms. Coumba Dady KA. These gardens impact villages at large in terms of food security, diversification and extra generation of revenues.
The most important challenges concern the supply of water (from the nearby borehole), as well as vegetable and fruit plants. All these challenges are related to the financial means necessary for the development of such an initiative.
In the next two or three years, the main goal is to ensure the sustainability of these gardens and to enable women to consolidate their new place. Enabling these women to have enough money to provide water and plants for their gardens is the sine qua non for the success of this project.
Ideally, however, they could also benefit from training to enable them to better cultivate these gardens.
In order to save biodiversity, Djibone Sissoko mobilises young people to stop bushfires from spreading in Mali and educates inhabitants from his commune Kita-Ouest about the dangers these fires pose for animals and for the environment. He acts to raise awareness among small farmers and their families about the harmful effects that bushfires can have if poorly managed, devastating fauna and flora in their path.
Friends Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern have co-founded Coral Vita, a high-tech coral farming solution to protect the dying reefs in The Bahamas and around the world. Through high-impact coral reefs restoration, Coral Vita helps preserve reefs for future generations while spurring the blue economy’s growth locally and globally.
Coral Vita’s land-based farms integrate breakthrough methods to accelerate coral growth up to 50x (micro fragmenting) while enhancing their resiliency to warming and acidifying oceans (assisted evolution). Coral Vita’s model scales: one land-based farm can potentially supply an entire nation’s reefs with sufficient capital investment.
Alongside this novel form of high-tech coral farming, Coral Vita is deploying an innovative for-profit model to sustain large-scale restoration. Given reefs’ tremendous value, they are working to transition restoration to a commercial industry. This unique model facilitates revenue generation and better scalability than any current restoration practitioners. Coral Vita sells reef restoration as a service to customers that depend on reefs’ benefits. As the farms grow diverse, resilient, and affordable coral for restoration projects, they also function as eco-tourism attractions and education centres. Guests pay to visit the farms, where they learn about the importance of protecting reefs, and how they can help, including by adopting coral or planting them with Coral Vita’s teams and local dive shops. Students, fishermen, and community members also visit the farm to build local capacity for future jobs in the blue economy, and Coral Vita emphasizes hiring locally as much as possible.
Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is acting to tackle a fundamental problem: water scarcity in wildlife zones!
The project is all about water for wildlife as one way of conservation and reducing human-wildlife conflict for competing for the same water resource. Indeed, as the number of conflicts between humans and wild animals started to rise due to water scarcity, Patrick decided to bring in an efficient solution through re-watering the dry wildlife zones. Moreover, Patrick is also looking for innovative methodologies to make sure that animals have plenty of water into the wildlife zones.
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