Urban Agriculture in Dakar

Even in the midst of supercities agriculture is thriving. In Senegal's Dakar over 6,000 people work in agriculture and the harvests are growing each year. Agriculture within urban areas does have its own set of unique challenges. Farmers are unable to expand their operations with more land. Loans are hard to come by for the farmers as some are working on land they do not own.

From the Inter Press Service, Koffigan Abigbli looks at one thriving farm. 

Watering cans in hand, men and women move back and forth between the wells and water storage tanks and the crops they’re watering: carrots, onions, tomatoes, cabbage, and potatoes, as well as fruit trees like palm, coconut, papaya and banana trees. Growers like Ahmadou Sene are working tirelessly to produce vegetables in and around the Senegalese capital.

Sene, in his forties, has a one-hectare plot. For three months of the year, he has a dozen young people to hoe and weed the garden, and for four months a group of 20 women work to harvest and sell his produce.

“Vegetables make up more than 80 percent of my crops,” he said, gesturing towards his garden. He cultivates his field year round, and harvests nearly 12 tonnes of vegetables each quarter.

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But while urban farming is growing, farmers are facing difficulties linked to access to land, the marketing of vegetables, the recycling of water for irrigation, and access to financing.
Even as the cultivated area is growing, some farmers are struggling to find land to expand their operations.

“In 2010, I had an 800 square metre field. I was able to turn a profit of 600,000 CFA (about 1,200 dollars). But this year, I’ve only got 350 square metres to farm, because the government has taken over a large portion of my land for a dam to hold water,” said Cheikh Mor Ndiaye, a grower at Cambérène, one of the sprawling suburbs on the outskirts of the capital.

The president of the administrative council of the Federated Cooperative of Horticulturalists of Senegal (CFAHS), Cheikh Ngane, told IPS that while garden farming provides livelihoods for a good number of Senegalese, it is undermined by the recurring problem of access to land.

“Most horticulturalists are working with land that belongs to the state. To develop horticulture, it’s important to resolve the problem of land,” he said, adding that the problem is aggravated by competing claims from developers working on residential housing developments.

The issue of land ownership can also lead to problems obtaining credit. “For example, if someone has their own plot, assigned to them by the rural community, bankers are not confident when they ask for a loan,” said Cheikh Ngane.

Introducing Overnight Links for December 8th

One of the struggles we constantly have with this blog is trying to do more posts than we already do. Since we do this on sort of a volunteer basis we seem to only get to three or four posts a day. That means there are some relevant stories that don't get linked to on the blog. Most of the stories that we miss are the ones that break during the overnight hours.

To try to remedy this, we will start each day with a digest form post of the overnight stories. A brief sentence will summarize the story which will accompany a link to read the entire story. We hope that by doing this, that we can become a more thorough source of stories regarding poverty. So here we go...

First, a gruesome Associated Press story that we found at KXAN-TV, deals with serial rapists stalking women in Somali refugee camps.

The Partners in Health blog has this video about bringing health care to Liberia.

Inter Press Service another story on the conflict between lack of government funding and efforts to improve health. Writer Souleymane Faye says that Senegal is facing cutbacks to a community material health program called Bajenu Gox.

Senegal's black market for medicine

From IRIN, a story on the black market for medicine in Senegal.

In Senegal eliminating the sale of unregulated or counterfeit medicines will take better laws and law enforcement, but as long as poor people have children getting sick sales will thrive, experts and residents say.

Street vendors across the country sell products of questionable quality smuggled in from other countries - in many cases outright fakes - or hawk medicines sold to them by pharmacists seeking illegal profits. In both cases consumers are at risk.

Aboubakrine Sarr, president of the private sector pharmacists’ union in Senegal, said there are no statistics on the impact, but “the free-for-all illegal street sale of aspirin packets wreaks havoc”.

Aspirins, antibiotics, Viagra, painkillers, anti-parasitic pills and many others can be found anywhere - improperly stored and sold by people who cannot advise on dosage or side-effects.

Many Dakar residents are aware of the risks but people IRIN spoke to said they had no choice.

Asked what mothers do when a child falls ill, Adama Ndiaye, a mother of four in Dakar’s Pikine neighbourhood, told IRIN: “We lose our minds. We’ve got no money for prescriptions.”

A neighbour, Mariama Niass, who sells sweets and trinkets in front of her home, said: “You go to the doctor and let’s say you’ve set aside 300 CFA francs [64 US cents] for the consultation. Then the doctor prescribes medicines costing 10,000, 7,000, 3,000 CFA francs [$6 to $21]. You come back home. You see the children. And you haven’t yet prepared dinner. You must use whatever money you have to buy rice and other items for a meal... The medicines that are sold in the streets - we all have been advised not to buy them, but we have to, because we can’t buy prescriptions.”

Efforts fall short

In July the Economic Community of West African States, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union published a guide to help states combat the unregulated sale of medicines, but there is a gap between international manuals and the reality on the ground.

“This is progress on the international scene but on the ground, we are forever taking one step forward, one step back,” the pharmacists’ union’s Sarr told IRIN.

Where pharmacists sell medicines to street vendors, some in the industry are calling for punishments similar to those faced by drug traffickers, but for now wrongdoers face minimal punishments and in some cases none at all, Sarr said.

“Punishments often are not even applied, because of lax enforcement or a kind of protection that exists among colleagues in the industry.” Between 2008 and 2010, five pharmacists were briefly suspended for collaborating with unauthorized sellers.

A bill regulating the pharmaceutical industry awaits debate in parliament.

Senegal does not have enough inspectors, according to Mamadou Ngom of WHO in Senegal.

There are just four official inspectors to check up on more than 1,000 pharmacies, three manufacturers and four wholesale distributors. Effective control would require five national inspectors as well as one in each of Senegal’s 14 regions, Ngom told IRIN.

Despite an apparent crackdown on the sales side - in 2009 the authorities shut down Dakar’s principal market for unregulated medicines, Keur Serigne Bi - sales continue, in that spot and many other marketplaces.

In Touba, one of Senegal’s main cities, several pharmacies have had to shut down because they can no longer compete with street vendors.

“It’s a problem that’s tough to manage,” Sarr told IRIN. “Still, on the positive side, religious authorities are beginning to take seriously the risk these unregulated products pose.”

Meanwhile, health officials are planning “awareness days” - in Dakar and four other regions - to talk with communities about the risk of buying unregulated medicines, according to Pape Amadou Diop, state director of pharmacies and medical laboratories.

Senegal gives scholarships to Haitian students

One of Africa's poorest nations is taking in students from Haiti, offering them scholarships at a Senegal University. Despite the touching act of charity, it has caused some grumbles amongst the public who complain about Senegal residents having trouble receiving scholarship money.

For the students taking Senegal up on the offer it's an opportunity to complete their education. They realize that the country of Senegal is almost as poor as Haiti, but most of Haiti's schools have yet to be rebuilt.

From the Independent On-Line, this Associated Press story depicts the students arrival.

The 163 students are the first batch of arrivals from Haiti in a grand scheme that began when President Abdoulaye Wade saw images of the devastated Caribbean nation following the January quake.

He was moved to help, arguing that Haitians are the sons and daughters of Africa because their ancestors were taken from the continent as slaves. French is the main language of Senegal, while Haitians speak French-derived Creole.

He initially offered free land to the quake victims, and the attempt to help them has become one of the main planks of Wade's larger goal of creating a global African community, which includes a proposal to unite the continent into a single country.

He was criticised at home when he went so far as to say that he would be willing to hand over a region of Senegal if a large number of Haitians were to agree to relocate here. The project has since been scaled back and the students will receive free housing - not land. They will also be offered scholarships in a nation where the campus of Senegal's largest university is frequently paralysed by strikes because of the late payment of scholarships.
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“This is a historic day,” said airport security guard Abdou Salam, who leaned against the peeling blue wall of the airport's VIP room in the hours before the chartered jet landed. “But it's a little weird. We're chartering a plane and giving them free scholarships, and yet we know that our own students can sometimes go six months without seeing their payments.”

Last year, students angry at not receiving their scholarships seized municipal buses as they entered the campus of Cheikh Anta Diop University in downtown Dakar. They blocked roads and were beaten back by police. The university's dorms are so overcrowded that rooms made for two often house four or more, forcing students to sleep in spoons on twin-sized beds.

The stigma of having HIV in Senegal

Social stigma prevents many HIV positive Senegalese from getting live saving drugs. The stigma of homosexuality or for even straight people with HIV forces them into hiding. So much so that AIDS drug distribution programs are unable to reach them. Several violent acts have happened in Senegal lately to reinforce the stigma.

From this CamWest News Service article, writer Peter O'Neil cites a new Pew survey on attitudes in Senegal.

Dr. Bara Ndiaye, project leader for the non-governmental organization Enda-Sante, said anti-AIDS initiatives led by government and non-government organizations are often viewed suspiciously.

"This society is very hostile toward homosexuals," said Ndiaye, whose organization works closely with MSM and sex workers on issues like safe sex, testing, treatment and nutrition.

"They assume it is promoting homosexuality."

Some Senegalese claim there had historically been a modest level of tolerance for sexual minorities in this former French colony, but a 2007 Pew Research Centre poll of 700 Senegalese respondents found that 97 per cent believed homosexuality "should be rejected" by society.

The poll had an error margin of four per cent, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Pew organization.
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National and international health organizations desperately need to reach out to these groups to ensure they don't spread HIV to sex partners, or in the case of mothers to their children during pregnancy or while breastfeeding, according to Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the $18.7-billion U.S. Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

He said social stigmatization represents the second-biggest barrier facing national and international bodies waging a multibillion-dollar battle against AIDS, a crisis that has been overtaken in the media by the global financial collapse, war, climate change and the H1N1 flu pandemic.

It is next only to weak government health-care systems in recipient countries, said Kazatchkine, whose organization funds Enda-Sante, Xam Xamle and Karlene.

"These people, because they're harassed, will hide," Kazatchkine told Canwest News Service.

We guess Senegal will have to export instead

The rice harvest is booming in Senegal... but no one there wants to eat it. After the food crisis of last year, Senegal decided to produce more rice. The problem is, the tastes of the public still prefer the rice imported from Asia.

It's an example of the public's preference running counter to the efforts to increase local food production to protect against future food price shocks.

From this AFP article that we found at Google News, writer Laurence Boutreux tries to answer why the Senegalese prefer foreign rice.

But the Senegalese, who serve rice with so many meals, said no thanks. Why? That's where it gets sticky.

Explanations range from taste to social standing to the legacy of colonialism. Whatever the reason, the government is now figuring out how to promote locally grown rice and hopes to import none of the staple by 2012.

It seems they may have a hard time achieving that goal. Last year, over three quarters of the 800,000 tonnes of rice consumed by the Senegalese was imported from Asia.

The impetus for change came from the food crisis, which had sent prices of imported rice soaring. Senegal has since been pushing locally grown rice to rely less on agricultural imports, but despite good crops, much remains unsold.
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According to the latest official estimates -- disputed by some producers -- the rice harvest will be at 508,481 tonnes for 2009, up 25 percent compared to 2008.

The figures have prompted a promise from Senegal's agriculture minister that the country "will not import a single kernel of rice in 2012".

But what if no one eats it?

One expert blamed the problem on the legacy of colonialism.

"It dates back to the colonisation," said Wore Gana Seck, the head of the commission for durable development and environment at Senegal's economic and social council.

"Before the Senegalese ate millet and sorghum, but the French imposed a monoculture of peanuts on farmers and imported broken rice from their other colony Indochina for the Senegalese to eat," she says.

How the credit crunch effects Senegal

National Public Radio's Morning Edition had a great story this morning on the effects of the global credit crisis in Senegal. Our snippet of the story will include just some actualities from people there. The audio of the full story can be found at the link below.

Despite many pledges from the United Nations and the World Bank that they will not forget the people on the bottom, some of the people questioned in this story doubt that the pledges will be kept.

National Public Radio November 4th

As night falls in Dakar, street vendors desperately try to offload a few more items before the close of business. Many are too busy to talk.

But Moustapha Diouf was keen to share his views about the impact of the global financial crisis on Africa.

"I saw one … an interview of one director of one bank here in Senegal," Diouf says. "He said the financial crisis would not affect the bank here in Senegal — in Africa in general. But … I know very well that this will affect Africa, this will affect Senegal in general. For sure … this will affect people like me — people who are here downtown selling things in order to go back to their home and feed their families."

Ndeye Sow, 26, hawks trinkets and traditional dolls up and down the streets of Dakar. She said she had been following news of the growing financial mess on the radio — then burst out with a litany of complaints about her immediate concern: the high cost of living in Senegal.

"What isn't expensive here in Senegal? Life is tough," says Sow, who has a 5-year-old son. She says fish is expensive; rice, too — even salt. "Everything has gone up in price in the market. Plus school fees, transport — you name it. Everything is expensive, yet no one has a proper job. We just can't afford to feed our families or send our children to school anymore. Every single day is a struggle."

Sow's concerns are mirrored all over Africa. She may not have a bank account, a mortgage, or stocks and shares, but that does not diminish her worries about trying to make ends meet. Crucial remittances are already down from Africans working abroad. They keep many families back home afloat.

The big question now for Africa is how badly it will be bruised by the global financial meltdown.

"It's becoming clear that many developing countries — African countries — will not be immune to the spillover effects of this global financial crisis," says former Nigerian finance minister and now World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. So, we consider that … particularly poor people within these countries are now in a kind of danger zone. And the danger for them lies in the fact that they're taking a hit from what I call the "Four Fs" — the fuel crisis, food crisis, the fertilizer crisis and now the financial crisis."

Other stories that we have posted on the credit crisis can be found here.

Senegal's Ndour, Italy's Benetton team up to tackle poverty

from Africasia

Senegal's leading musician Youssou Ndour and Italian clothing giant Benetton on Wednesday launched a campaign to promote micro-credit as a way to tackle poverty in Africa.

"We are trying to focus on the concept that micro-credit could be a good tool for Africa to fight poverty," Ndour said during a ceremony where he also unveiled his own micro-financing company.

Dubbed "Africa Works", the campaign will include press and television advertising and is to run worldwide until early April.

"We are not here to ask for charity or gifts, we want to have dignified relations with the world. It's a question of dignity for the African people," said Ndour.

"It's not a matter of doing charity, it's a matter of doing something that will last," said Alessandro Benetton, executive deputy chairman of the Benetton group.

Ndour's credit company, named Birima, will offer financial loans to small and medium scale entrepreneurs, artists, craftspeople and others who may not qualify for bank loans due to their lack of collateral.

The credit firm is set to start off with a capital of some 200 million CFA francs (305,000 euros, 445,000 dollars).

"We think that in the first instance ... we will need 200 million CFA francs," Ndour told AFP.

The company is named after Senegalese legendary king Birima, renowned for keeping his word, a key moral code on which the company's tenets are built.

The king "was generous and liked music. He had only one word, and he respected it. Therefore the idea of Birima is that people become really credible again by keeping their word," said Ndour, who is a UNICEF goodwill ambassador as well.

Ndour is also a leading campaigner against illegal emigration by African youths who risk their lives in rickety boats to try to sail to Europe fleeing poverty back home.

Senegal's donors agree to give four billion dollars

from Yahoo News

DAKAR (AFP) - Senegal's main donors on Thursday pledged to extend four billion dollars in financial aid to the west African country over a three year period until 2010, the World Bank said.

"Senegal's partners committed themselves to provide 3.945 million dollars in financial assistance between 2007 and 2010," said a World Bank statement released at the end of a two day meeting in Paris of the donors' advisors.

These funds, to be used to stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty, are 1.3 billion dollars more than what the west African country had sought.

Senegalese Prime Minister Sheik Hadjibou Soumare said the government wanted to reduce poverty levels to under 30 percent from more than 42 percent recorded in 2005.

World Bank director of operations in Senegal Madani Tall stressed that the country needed "to improve on governance, the fight against corruption and promote the efficient management of public funds."

The financial backers are however nervous at slowing economic growth which dropped from five percent in 2005 to 2.1 percent last year.

Senegal's advisory group icludes the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, the United Nations Development Programme, former colonial power France and the United States Development Agency (USAID).

'People treat you as if you are nothing'

from The Guardian

What good is free education when poverty means children are forced into work? Liz Ford reports from Senegal.

It's a hot, sunny day on Goree Island, a short boat ride from Senegal's bustling capital, Dakar. In the cooling shade of an overhanging tree in the grounds of Mariama Ba school, Aminata Deme talks about a short film on slavery she and her classmates have just recorded. In it, the 14-year-old plays a girl who abuses her family's maid.

"I was one of the people mistreating the maid, which was bad. It was a very meaningful film and very interesting to make," says Aminata.

It's not uncommon in the more wealthy homes in Senegal's cities to have someone to help around the house. But the age of those performing the chores, the hours they work and the wages they receive have been called into question by the 19 pupils from Mariama Ba who shot the film, called My Maid, Not a Slave, as part of an anti-slavery project organised by the UK branch of the children's rights charity Plan International.

The new slavery

Over the past few months, the pupils at the girls' school, one of the most prestigious in Senegal, have been learning about the history of slavery, the impact the trade has had on west Africa and how new forms of the practice have been allowed to seep into society.

Organised by Plan UK and National Museums Liverpool to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade this year, the project, Make the Link, Break the Chain, involved schoolchildren from 13 schools based along the so-called slave triangle.

Pupils from Senegal, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Haiti and the UK created web pages, produced written work and shared information online and by email. The youngsters then used video, music and art to interpret their findings. All their work will be showcased at the International Slavery Museum, which opens in Liverpool this week.

Goree is a fitting location for a project on slavery. Between 1776 and 1848, hundreds of thousands of slaves were shipped to the Americas from a transit house on the edge of the island. Walking around the house now, its bright red walls seem too cheerful for the horror of what went on here. Visitors are shown the shackles the slaves wore and the cramped rooms in which they lived.

It is a brutal reminder of the past, but as the work of Mariama Ba's pupils shows, a new form of slavery still exists in Senegal. In a dusty village about 70km north of Dakar, 17-year-old Salimata Kandge talks about the two years she spent working as a maid in the capital. From the age of 13, she cooked and cleaned for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for CFA 15,000 a month - about $30 - barely a dollar a day. She was verbally abused by her employers, ignored by people she met in the street and longed to go home.

"The bosses tell you that you are here for work and you have to work, and when you go out, there are other people who treat you like you are nothing," she says.

No alternative

Absa Nguing, now 20, says when she was younger, she went to Dakar with her sisters and her mother, who needed to find work to feed the family. She never went to school and, at the age of 12, she too became a domestic maid. "It was difficult when I became a maid, but I was obliged to do it," she says. "I worked with a woman who was blind. I went to the market one day and when I came back, the woman took the fish I bought and hit me with it. She was not happy with what I'd bought, but I didn't know because I was very young."

Two years ago, Salimata and Absa were brought back from Dakar to their home villages, thanks to an initiative supported by Plan International. The organisation has been involved in setting up training centres in needlework, hairdressing and metal work in villages around Thiès, Senegal's second largest city, to offer the youngsters vocational qualifications. Salimata and Absa are now working towards diplomas in hairdressing and sewing, respectively. Plan is also providing financial incentives to parents to keep their children at home and in school.

A combination of poverty and an education system that has little concern for those who struggle leads many young people to Dakar to search for work. According to Unicef, 37% of children between the ages of five and 14 are involved in some form of work in Senegal. Although primary and secondary education is compulsory - and free - many parents are still reluctant to send their children to school, and drop-out rates are high.

Children who finish their primary education have to sit an exam to determine if, and where, they will get a place in secondary school. Those who do well go to good schools, such as Mariama Ba, a state-funded institution that used to educate the daughters of the elite but now takes the brightest girls from across the country. Those who perform poorly find their choices limited and often end up in classes of more than 80 children. Those who fail tend to disappear from the education radar altogether.

If children make it through the first two years of secondary school, they sit a further exam to determine whether they will finish their education. But some, mostly girls, do not get the chance to sit this exam. They are married off or are considered old enough to be sent out to earn money for the family, which in many cases for rural teenagers involves a perilous trip to the capital.

Salimata began working in Dakar after she finished primary school. She had failed her secondary exams, but even if she had passed, she might not have been allowed to stay on, as her family needed money.

"It's about poverty. Families need their children to go to work," says Falelou Seck, programme unit manager at Plan in Thiès.Seck is charged with helping to bring children back from Dakar and prevent more going there. His work is concentrated in two regions around Thiès that are home to more than 5,000 families. He estimates that at least one child from each family has been or is still working in Dakar. Many face physical and sexual abuse.

Parents are often ill-informed of the dangers their children face in the capital, or are so desperate for money they are willing to risk their child's welfare, says Seck. His team has to convince parents of the benefits of keeping their children in their village, which means offering them education opportunities and a way to make money closer to home.

"We are reaching out to parents to explain the dangers and risks to their children, so that they will ask their children to come back," he says. "We try to stop them from leaving and keep them in school."

Teenagers who are keen to head to the bright lights of the city, imagining opportunity, rather than exploitation, are taken on trips to Dakar to see the reality. Those who still wish to go are given advice on how to stay safe. "Every now and again, we do have children who make some success of themselves," says Seck. "We can't stop [them] from leaving, but we can prepare them and give them the skills, so they would not have to accept the worst kinds of work or conditions. We try to prepare them for their future."

The scheme is showing signs of success. Since it began in 2005, with a £30,000 grant, some 320 children have returned from Dakar and at least 180 more have been tracked down and want to come back home.

Problems across Africa

Child labour and poor access to education are common problems across Africa, but, in some ways, Senegal is in a better position than its neighbours. Independence from France in 1960 passed relatively smoothly and Senegal has no scars from civil war. In fact, the country is now seen as one of the most stable in Africa. However, it is still one of the poorest in the world, chiefly because it has limited natural resources and is predominantly rural. According to Unicef, 22% of the population live on less than a dollar a day.

The government has shown its commitment to education, allocating 40% of the budget to the sector, but the latest figures from the ministry of education show that only around 65% of children attend primary school. Just 21% continue on to secondary school and 9% pass the exam that allows them to complete their education.

Despite this, ministers have set ambitious targets. By 2010, they want to achieve universal primary education, five years before the Millennium Development Goal set by the UN. They also want to double the number of pupils completing secondary school and increase the number of students taking vocational qualifications from 3% to 25% within the next three years.

Unicef believes the primary goal is within the country's grasp, but a great deal more will need to be done by the government and outside donors to provide education opportunities to more young people. Opening the eyes of teenagers to the experiences of their contemporaries through projects such as Make the Link, and giving them the chance of a better life through training colleges is a small, yet significant, step in the right direction.

· www.plan-ed.org. Listen to the girls' stories in our online audio slideshow: EducationGuardian.co.uk/schoolsworldwide