👷🏾♀️ How we use effective solutions to impact girls and women in Ndiaganiao, Senegal (Episode 2) 📐
🕡 In Soussoum (commune of #Ndiaganiao in #Senegal), like many other Senegalese and West African villages, millet mill projects come and go. 🌾
🗃 Launched by numerous national and international initiatives to solve the problem of millet drudgery for rural women. Unfortunately, they can only be summed up in one word: FAILURE. 🙈
In fact, for over 50 years, these mill projects have been veritable white elephants 🐘 (bringing in dollars galore for mega-NGOs, international mega-organizations, and all the middlemen and importers involved - under the guise of helping our brave women). 🙉
⁉ In every village in Senegal and the sub-region, you can see dozens of mill carcasses piled up, accompanied by the buildings that were supposed to house them, which are themselves falling into ruin one by one. 🙊
⚠ Victims of projects that are all too often poorly designed, opaque procurement procedures, patronage-based political donations, and sometimes even well-intentioned humanitarian projects. 🤷🏾♀️️
- Diesel-powered machines when the nearest gas station is 50 km away ⛽
- Machines with electric motors when the receiving village has no electricity, ⚡
- No spare parts or after-sales service, 🚧
- No business model associated with these donations: "Take it, ladies, and make do with the mill," 🤔
The devil is in the details, you might say. 🕵🏾♂️️
In fact, if all it would take to solve the problem of millet drudgery was to give every rural women's group a mill, the problem would have disappeared long ago in our regions. 🙏
With this in mind, we at Nadji.Bi Sénégal decided to change the situation and provide a lasting solution for our sisters and mothers. 👩🏽❤️👩🏾
By rehabilitating the ruins left by these white elephants of development and creating women's service structures: decentralized, innovative and disruptive structures that we've called "Walalma", which could be translated into English as: "Grind my millet!” 💪
💡 Looking ahead, a solar and sustainable solution, #MadeinSenegal 🌞
Stay tuned for the rest of this great story Walalma 🚀
Walalma: a project of the Nadji.Bi Sénégal, whose "Connected Solar Center for Rural Women - Walalma 2" in Soussoum was co-financed by l'Agence des Micro Projets of the NGO La Guilde and the Association Argonne-Manengouba.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7179830743462752256
The failure of past projects