Help End Extreme Poverty in Noubou, Senegal
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Summary Appeal
Noubou is small village in East Senegal. Noubou has no road connecting it to any other village. Sale of goods is impossible. This has led to a state of poverty in the village which means residents lack access to healthcare, running water, education and a healthy diet. Residents eat rice almost exclusively.
This fundraiser hopes to begin to solve these issues by granting the village a stream of income.
Your donation will contribute to the village's vegetable garden fences and transport. The garden fences will allow vegetable growth through protection from predators. These will then be transported to the local market through the rugged terrain with the trolley-motorbike seen below. Vegetable sales sustain vegetable consumption.
Mamadou, vice-president of Noubou’s agricultural association (AJRSK), driving the motorbike with some of the village’s farmers.
Noubou’s Story
Noubou is a small and isolated village in East Senegal. It is the last of four similar villages before the Senegal-Guinea border from the regional capitals of Salemata (40km away) and Kedougou (100km away). With no road connecting it to either of these towns or any other form of civilisation, its identity as a farming community has been challenged in the modern age.
A typical home in Noubou
Noubou survives by consuming what it grows. There was a time when this alone was enough for its residents. This time is no longer.
Noubou has a damaging lack of access to healthcare, education, electricity and running water. Its male population has almost entirely emigrated to the cities in search of these privileges.
The AJRSK (Association Jeunes Ressortisants de Salemata à Kedougou) was founded to help guarantee the above by encouraging commercial agriculture.
The members of the AJRSK
Noubou has vast amounts of land available to grow crops for sale, but no road to transport them to the market.
Journey to Salemata
To transport crops to the market of Salemata, 2 - 3 hour bike journeys to and from the town are required.
The path itself has large stretches flooded over during the wet season, rocky descents and overgrown sections; it is considered dangerous even to Noubou natives, to the Western perspective it is simply immoral.
As a result, commercial farming has been much neglected by Noubou throughout its history.
The Three-Wheeler
The AJRSK identified a solution, a three-wheeler trolleyed motorbike small enough to cross the path but large enough to transport vegetables.
The problem was it’s 1.4 million CFA (£2,100) cost. The AJRSK launched a fundraiser for the three-wheeler which raised £1,000 some months ago. It was a great success to be able to raise so much attention, but it was unable to raise the required amount.
Together with its own £300 contribution, the AJRSK were able to buy the three-wheeler on credit in anticipation of the upcoming harvest. The seller still expects an £800 return as soon as possible.
Having complete ownership of the three-wheeler will be momentous for the community of Noubou, it is the first step in guaranteeing a level of economic ownership in the village.
Noubou’s farmers on the three-wheeler
Further Funding: Noubou’s Fences and Malnutrition
In addition, this fundraiser is asking for a further £1,200 that will fund Noubou’s fences.
Fences are needed to protect cultivation during the dry season when predators run amok.
The reason that 77% of all lands in Noubou cultivate only maize and rice is simply because these are crops are grown during the wet season.
A final 1% of all land is dedicated to vegetables, ideal during the dry season.
A cornfield of Noubou
Mamadou with his N’Dama Cattle, the key predators of vegetable crops, paradoxically the compost of these is required to grow vegetables.
The vegetable garden story
Using his personal funds, the president of the AJRSK was able to buy wooden fences to build a 25mx25m vegetable garden for the village.
The garden was created from very fertile but unused lands, it assigns plots to requesting residents, only to grow native or appropriate vegetable crops like gombo (okra), diagatou, sou, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, cucumbers and salads.
Currently, it is the only producer of these crops in Noubou accounting for the entirety of the aforementioned 1% and as a result, much loved and desired by the village.
Miriama watering her plot of land
Unfortunately the garden fences are now in tatters from cow aggravation.
With a low rate of garden sales, the AJRSK is unable to cover the cost of fence maintenance.
Last dry season goats were tragically able to make their way over the fence four separate times, ravaging every single crop and destroying the harvests. These incidents left the residents of Noubou extremely disheartened and the Association unsure of the ability to retain the project.
South-West vegetable garden corner
Western vegetable garden wall with Amadou, one of the Farmers sons
Eastern vegetable garden wall with Mamadou
Iron Fences
Even with the three-wheeler, the coming dry-season promises further cow aggravation and profit hinderance.
We hope to end this game of catch-up right now
There is a waitlist with over 150 names of people waiting to get in on the next extension.
These are people not just waiting for an income, but waiting for the ability to include vegetables into them and their children's diets.
So the additional £1,200 requested in this fundraiser wishes to completely eradicate the waitlist by covering the cost of a 2-hectare extension to the garden with a durable iron fence.
This would be an indescribably helpful headstart for Noubou which just a couple of months ago began to consider the vegetable garden project effectively finished.
Proposed land for the garden expansion
Every pound over 800 will go into investment in iron fences to expand the garden. Every contribution matters, just by donating £5 you could be pushing another family off the waitlist and onto farming vegetables.
Conclusion
The amount of help this money could provide to Noubou will change the course of its future, the AJRSK will for the first time have enough of a stream of income to invest in the new rather than repair the old. Refining, expanding and, if it eventually becomes big enough, automating the garden with irrigation systems.
The money you donate today could eventually lead Noubou to provide happy livelihoods to its current youth rather than forcing them to find such in the city, seeing their family and children a couple of weeks in a year.
Moreover, the reliance on gas money from city relatives hopes to wane to a distant memory; the ownership of simple medicine like Ibuprofen and Paracetamol promises to no longer be a privilege afforded to the very few.
After all, while this fundraiser is about improving a community it is also about making it liveable. A stroll through Noubou will not prove it difficult to sight many young children with enlarged abdomens, a key sign of malnutrition. The AJRSK hopes the proliferation of vegetable garden usage will directly eradicate this.
Noubou needs money. The troubles the village faces are extensive and the natural results of extreme poverty. But what is great about this fundraiser is doesn’t expect to solve them all, rather it is a hugely important starter kit to help the village help itself. All we need to do is to get the wheel turning.
Organizer
Nicolas Mosquera
Organizer