Climate Smart Rural Villages in Africa

Since beginning our Senegal activities in 2010, CREATE! has refined an innovative approach that has changed lives of thousands of women, their families and villages in 17 rural Senegalese communities by integrating climate action and livelihoods. Using abundant solar energy, our program improves access to scarce water for the villages, giving them the resources for WASH and agricultural activities. This has improved their health and nutrition as evidenced by data on Minimum Dietary Diversity in Women (MDD-W), a verifiable nutrition indicator. More than 97% of women in our communities achieved MDD-W in 2019. The women also generate income through sale of their excess vegetable produce, a step that leads towards their economic empowerment and self-sufficiency.

The problem we are addressing is food insecurity in the Sahel, West Africa. Our challenges to address this program include maintaining the quality of our innovation as we train other partners to implement activities. Currently, we have implemented our projects directly, supervising well rehabilitation, installation of renewable energy systems, execution of community gardens farmed by women’s groups, poultry projects, and saving and credit associations with our technicians. We will address this challenge by thoroughly training partners and making periodic monitoring and evaluation visits to ensure that they are following our guidelines and standards while carrying out their initiatives. Another challenge we expect is that national and local governments endorse our innovation as a viable intervention to change rural women and their families’ lives. We are addressing this challenge in Senegal by approaching government departments responsible for nutrition and food security like the Nutrition Reinforcement Program and Food Security Commission to ensure that our programs are in sync with their objectives. We have invited the Nutrition Reinforcement Program field staff to visit our projects and are exploring collaboration with their strategic government program.

CREATE! has made significant progress empowering rural communities in Senegal to achieve food security, improved nutrition and healthy lives using environmentally appropriate technologies and nature-based solutions under the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework. Our innovative approach harnesses abundant solar energy to improve perennial access to scarce water. This water helps communities grow nutritious vegetables year-round, thus improving their food security, nutrition, and health. Our 17 partner communities now have clean water that helped them grow more than 25 tons of vegetables in 2019. 97% women in our communities achieved Minimum Dietary Diversity, a verifiable nutrition indicator. The women are also earning income from the sale of their excess vegetable produce and learning to save their income. Each beneficiary saved about $21 on an average per month in 2019. Our work is thus developing self-sufficient, empowered, environmentally responsible and sustainable communities.

Almost all the beneficiaries that CREATE! collaborates with live on less than $5 per day. Climate change, resulting in decreased rainfall, droughts and desertification has restricted water access further for irrigation and food production. With less cultivation area and time, rural families concentrate more on cash crop cultivation rather than food crops to sustain them economically. This has led to Senegal being a net importer of food crops. For poor rural households like that of Rokhy Diouf of Back Samba Dior or Mame Fatou Kébé of Fass Kane, this limits their ability to consume nutritious food since their economic situation does not allow them to always buy expensive imported food. This has in turn impacted food security, nutrition, and dietary diversity adversely with the World Food Program estimating that 17% of people in Senegal are food insecure. Micronutrient deficiencies are also alarmingly high with 66% of children under 5 years and 54% of women of reproductive age being anemic[1].

With the men migrating, the women are left alone to take care of the rest of the family. This breaks down the cultural fabric of the community. Lack of education also poses a constraint for employment opportunities. 

Our programs recognize and build on local knowledge and respond to the community’s requirements through techniques and technologies that are appropriate to their local conditions. Our goal is to provide training and support during the implementation period to enable communities to develop skills that will last them a lifetime. This model helps communities achieve food security and has a positive economic impact by providing them with income generating opportunities and the means to mobilize their increased income through self-managed savings groups. This increased income allows communities to not just improve their life but to also sustain the CREATE! program.

The integrated nature of CREATE!s activities makes it possible for us to have significant on the lives of rural women. The COVID-19 pandemic in Senegal has interrupted our progress. For most rural communities, not working in the face of this pandemic is not an option since their work is what helps them survive. In times of such need, our solar-powered water system to access clean water for drinking, gardening, and sanitation practices as well as community gardens to put food on the table is helping our communities. We have also started COVID-19 awareness training on the danger of the virus, proper hygiene methods, maintaining proper distances and other safety measures while working in the gardens. Expanding this emergency response will help the women to keep working while remaining safe.

Our core technologies are solar-powered water systems and drip irrigation. CREATE! has made significant progress empowering rural communities in Senegal to achieve food security, improved nutrition and healthy lives using environmentally appropriate technologies and nature-based solutions under the UN Sustainable Development Goals framework. Our innovative approach harnesses abundant solar energy to improve perennial access to scarce water. This water helps communities grow nutritious vegetables year-round, thus improving their food security, nutrition, and health. Our 17 partner communities now have clean water that helped them grow more than 25 tons of vegetables in 2019. 97% women in our communities achieved Minimum Dietary Diversity, a verifiable nutrition indicator. The women are also earning income from the sale of their excess vegetable produce and learning to save their income. Each beneficiary saved about $21 on an average per month in 2019. Our work is thus developing self-sufficient, empowered, environmentally responsible and sustainable communities.

Since beginning our activities in 2010, we have achieved the following results and impact in the 17 partner communities that CREATE! has collaborated with and empowered:

• 50-100 people mobilized into cooperative groups and trained in sustainable development
• 20,000 liters of water pumped out daily from rehabilitated well using solar powered pumping system
• 5 different vegetable species grown on an average every month
• 300 pounds of nutritious vegetables produced per month
• 98% of women aged 15-49 years achieve Minimum Dietary Diversity
• Women earn $30 on an average every month through sale of vegetable and poultry
• Women save $20 on an average every month through VSLA training
• Each community plants 1000 trees every year. 

Next year CREATE! will provides year-round access to water to over 11,000 women and their families and neighbors, enabling communities to produce nutritious food year-round, improving their health and well-being. Communities can also sell their excess produce in the markets, thus improving their economic situation and helping them break free of the poverty trap.  Based on demand from women’s groups and neighboring communities and countries where CREATE! currently works, in five years we can scale our work by 450% and provide clear water, nutritious food, and income-generating opportunities to at least 5,000 women directly and over 50,000 villagers indirectly if funding is available.   

The ongoing demand for our activities in Senegal and neighboring countries, combined with our timely and integrated COVID-19 response will serve as a springboard for CREATE! to scale our program to communities throughout Senegal and neighboring countries by training local organizations. We currently have a long waiting list of up to fifty villages in Senegal, along with requests from neighboring countries The Gambia and Guinea. We envision scaling our activities through a combination of direct implementation and training local NGOs and governments on implementing our approach. We trained our first NGO in The Gambia earlier this year and will deepen our presence there. In Senegal, we are planning to expand our activities to new regions of the country and new communities. Where appropriate, we will deploy technicians to train women’s groups and manage projects. In other instances, we will train partners to implement and manage climate action and livelihoods initiatives. Our technical team led by our Senegal Director Omar Ndiaye Seck in Senegal will lead our training and capacity building activities, and train local NGOs to scale CREATE!s approach and impact throughout Senegal and West Africa.   

Our challenges include maintaining the quality of our innovation as we train other partners to implement activities. Currently, we have implemented our projects directly, supervising well rehabilitation, installation of renewable energy systems, execution of community gardens farmed by women’s groups, poultry projects, and saving and credit associations with our technicians.  Another challenge we expect is that national and local governments endorse our innovation as a viable intervention to change rural women and their families’ lives. 

We will address this challenge by thoroughly training partners and making periodic monitoring and evaluation visits to ensure that they are following our guidelines and standards while carrying out their initiatives. We are addressing this challenge in Senegal by approaching government departments responsible for nutrition and food security like the Nutrition Reinforcement Program and Food Security Commission to ensure that our programs are in sync with their objectives. We have invited the Nutrition Reinforcement Program field staff to visit our projects and are exploring collaboration with their strategic government program.

Twenty staff, three in the US and 17 in Senegal work on our solution team. 

In the ten years that CREATE! has worked in rural Senegal, we have developed a robust and deliberative approach to selecting communities based on their mobilization and engagement ability. Executive Director Michael Carson possesses over twenty years’ community economic development experience and served as Africare’s Senegal Country Director from 1998-2003. He has overseen agriculture development, village-level savings and credit associations and community health activities in Senegal and throughout Africa, and will provide technical and managerial oversight to CREATE!s Solve Team. CREATE!s Country Director Omar Seck possesses over ten years of complex project management experience. He has served as an Administrator with CREATE!, and is versed in all aspects of project management and our approach. Amadou Diouf is CREATE!’s Senior Agriculture Technician and Field Training Coordinator. He has nearly ten years’ experience in providing agriculture extension services to farmers. Mr. Diouf will manage our agriculture technicians and supervise all technical advice and training to women farmers in CREATE!’s Solve Team. Paulomi Bhattacharyya is a trained economist and performance management specialist. She is responsible for developing and managing collection, collation and diffusion of CREATE!s performance data from its Senegal women’s empowerment program. Paulomi will continue to oversee and train our staff on impact data collection. She regularly interfaces and shares our impact data with our foundation donors and will play a similar role with our Solve Team.

CREATE! currently partners with the Senegal Ministry of Water and Forestry, the NGOs Tostan, The Lerato Project, Gambia, and CARITAS/Senegal. Our staff have been trained on community empowerment and gender approaches by Tostan. We trained Lerato project on implementing our climate smart approach, and we receive data on well siting and drilling from CARITAS/Senegal. The Senegal Ministry of Water and Forestry and CREATE! work closely together on well rehabilitation and reforestationWe also partner with the Government of Senegal Nutrition Reinforcement Program on technical and best practices exchange on food security and nutrition issues. 

CREATE!'s proven integrated community development model has the following objectives:

• To ensure that the community has access to perennial water for agricultural cultivation and household use without depleting natural resources.
• To ensure that community members are mobilized and organized into cooperative groups to manage their activities and receive training from the CREATE! technicians.
• To ensure that cooperative members have knowledge and capability to produce sustainable harvests of a variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts from their gardens.
• To ensure that the community is no longer food insecure.
• To ensure that cooperative members are better able to supplement their families' incomes through the sale of vegetables.
• To ensure that the community members have secure access to locally-sourced protein and a new source of household income through the production of chicken.
• To ensure that the women beneficiaries are better able to save money and have ready access to loans in Voluntary Savings and Lending Associations (VSLA).
• To ensure that the community takes part in the reforestation campaign and plants trees for shade, food and firewood while helping recharge the groundwater.

With this grant and technical assistance, CREATE! anticipates expanding our program to more communities in Senegal as well as other countries in sub-Saharan Africa that are currently plagued by similar problems of climate change and water shortage. With our current budget, CREATE! is expanding to 2-3 rural communities every year. But there are more than 50 other communities who are waiting to partner with us. The Solve funds will allow us to partner with more such under-served but committed communities and implement our innovative program. The funds will also help us scale up our program activities to other countries in West Africa like the Gambia, Guinea or Guinea-Bissau who have similar needs. 

At CREATE!, we want to improve our project monitoring and evaluation process through training programs. The Solve technical assistance and funding will allow us to do so. Our plan is to also develop and introduce new health related components into our program activities. For example, our Senegal team has identified a need to start nutrition activities in our partner communities in conjunction with our food security and agriculture activities. In order to do so, we first need to conduct sufficient research on nutrition and on the process of introducing such plans in our communities. The Solve funding will allow us to do so. This will in turn help our communities have a better nutrition outcome in the future. 

We are interested in partnering with Solve experts in sustainable food systems to advise us on refining our approach. We are interested in partnering with foundations and impact investments that critically assess NGO solutions and that can guide us on improving our model. 

CREATE! was founded on the principle of strong community driven partnerships designed to meet the basic needs of the rural population. Our programs recognize and build on local knowledge and respond to their requirements through techniques and technologies that are appropriate to their local conditions. Throughout the course of the program, CREATE! technicians work to put in place systems to promote long-term project sustainability. This same framework will be followed for these two communities. Full project implementation in each community will last approximately four years, with technicians continuing to provide training and support to cooperative members throughout the implementation period. In each of them, technicians will collaborate with participants to establish management committees. These committees are composed of garden cooperative leaders who will be trained in the use and maintenance of the wells, solar panels, and irrigation systems. After CREATE! training ceases in these communities, these leaders will continue to train other women in the maintenance of these systems. By ensuring that community members continue to receive training and support, CREATE! believes that participating villages will be able to maintain their solar water pumps and irrigation systems in perpetuity. If selected, we will use the Andar Innovation Prize to advance our work with women in Senegal. 

CREATE! was founded on the principle of strong community driven partnerships designed to meet the basic needs of the rural population. With sustainability at the heart of our approach, our programs recognize and build on local knowledge and respond to the community’s requirements through techniques and technologies that are appropriate to their local conditions. Our goal is to provide training and support during the implementation period to enable communities to develop skills that will last them a lifetime. This model helps communities achieve food security and has a positive economic impact by providing them with income generating opportunities and the means to mobilize their increased income through self-managed savings groups. This increased income allows communities to not just improve their life but to also sustain the CREATE! program. CREATE!s program is implemented in three stages leading from infrastructure development to training and monitoring towards self-sufficiency. After a community has moved through the three stages, they are prepared to “graduate” from our program to a self-sufficient status and lead their development projects themselves. This idea of self-sufficient management of their own programs is also helped by the sense of ownership of the program that the CREATE! staff nurture in the community members from the beginning. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that CREATE! signs with our partner communities stipulates their active participation in each aspect of the project- design, implementation and maintenance. Cooperative members attend weekly or bi-weekly training sessions in sustainable agriculture, Voluntary Savings and Lending Association (VSLA) procedures, poultry production, and cookstove maintenance. In addition, women work daily to care for growing vegetables in their cooperative gardens and meet weekly in VSLAs.

Together with the physical contribution, members also financially commit to the projects by donating land for the garden and by committing to repay back some of the input costs. By requiring both physical and financial participation in activities, CREATE! helps produce community ownership of projects, a factor that leads to community self-sufficiency. Receiving the Future Capital Prize will enable CREATE! to expand its sustainable climate action and women's empowerment approach to more communities in Senegal and the Gambia.