Every month, we receive dozens of fabulous photos from the CREATE! field team in Senegal – more than we can usually fit into our blog each week. So to celebrate the end of our busy spring season, and welcome in the new summer season, we wanted to share some photo highlights from Senegal from the past few months of our field work there. If a picture really is worth a thousand words, we hope these photos will speak volumes for the incredible work our field team continues to do in rural Senegal each and every day.
CREATE! Founder Barry Wheeler visited the Senegal field teams in May. Here in Fass Koffe, he appreciated hearing from the women about the progress that they’ve made since graduating from CREATE!’s program.
As CREATE!’s newest partner community, Mboss will soon be replacing this traditional means of pulling water from a well with a solar pumping system installed by CREATE!
In a community where temperatures can soar above 43 degrees C (110 degrees F), the shade of lush green trees and thriving gardens are a welcome relief, as seen here in Ouarkhokh. With the average annual temperature expected to rise by nearly 1 degree C in Senegal over the next 40 years (source: UNDP African Adaptation Programme) due to climate change, it is important to be nurturing the land now in preparation for the future
Thienaba is one of many communities in Senegal where women take part in CREATE!’s Voluntary Savings and Lending Association (VSLA) program. The program was introduced in response to community members’ need for a simple, yet effective, way to manage their money. As a self-managed, highly organized, and democratic money management system, it helps women gain basic financial literacy skills and that they can use to manage their profits from poultry and agricultural production programs.
Although many of CREATE!’s programs focus on helping women, men play a vital role in our program activities as well. In the community of Walo, for example, men volunteer to work in the community garden. With their involvement, they can also support their wives’, sisters’, and daughters’ involvement, as well as gain financial and agricultural skills to support their families together.
In Diender, the CREATE! community garden is now going on its 7th year, thanks to the dedication of the nearly 40-member community garden cooperative that keeps it running year-round. Here women have learned efficient composting techniques to reuse the organic matter leftover from their crops and donkeys.
Thienaba is one of many villages where members have planted fruit and nut trees as part of CREATE!’s cooperative community garden project. A total of more than 11,000 fruit and nut trees have been planted since 2010 in all of CREATE!’s partner communities.