Work in Senegal is made possible by the posting of a CIAT staff member at ISRA to work as part of the Senegalese team of ICRISAT's Desert Margins Programme (DMP), in association with other partner organisations such as ANCAR; The Direction of Water, Forests, Hunting and Soil Conservation (DEFCCS); The Direction of Agiculture (DA); CIRAD; IRD and others. The DMP, which is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), aims to improve rural livelihoods by increasing the capacity of populations to manage their fragile environments in a sustainable way.

The DMP programme started in 2003 and works in nine sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Namibia, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. One objective is to improve knowledge about the existence and management of biodiversity and soil fertility. Two of its outputs are entitled "stakeholder participation" and "capacity building". In Senegal, we have chosen to implement these outputs with community rural councils by participating in the monitoring and evaluating of their local development plans. In Senegal, the expression "rural communities" refers to local government organisations equivalent to municipalities which include various villages. The president and counsellors of the rural council are democratically elected.

Local development plans are required by the Senegalese law on decentralisation. Usually, they contain important components of managing natural resources, agriculture, forestry, and livestock. Improvement of biodiversity and soil fertility is, in many cases, explictly explicitly expressed as an objective in these plans.

As well as involving local stakeholders in the programme, the DMP aims to contribute to local goals by providing training, documentation, seeds, and plant materials, by organising exchanges between villages or between rural communities, and by documenting local innovations. The contributions are planned through regular meetings with the rural council, development committee (which is in charge of monitoring the local development plan), union of farmer organisations, and federation of women's groups. Soil, crop, and livestock management practices, and plant and tree varieties can be experimented with by farmers, and their success evaluated in follow-up meetings. ICTs (Internet and telephone) can be used to communicate the rural communities' needs and results within a network of resource persons composed of the partners in the project. The idea is to involve partners, including farmers, scientists and extension agents, in a regular feedback process to stimulate learning and innovation for everyone involved.

The Senegalese component of the DMP is focused on four regions of the country—Kaolak, Diourbel, Fatik, and Thiès. DMP and its partners chose 20 rural communities with whom to interact in this way, five in each of the four regions. Extension agents of the National Agricultural and Rural Advisory Agency (ANCAR), through their local support programmes, are ensuring follow-up between meetings and training events. In many cases they have included some of the DMP-promoted practices in their own training activities. We expect the monitoring process to be functioning in the 20 rural communities of the four regions by early 2006.

Further Reading

Beaulieu, N. et groupe de planification pour le développement rural 2003 (actualisé en 2004). Guide pour la planification, le suivi et l'évaluation participatifs avec une approche systémique. (445 kb) Rapport interne, CIAT/ISRA, Dakar, Sénégal. 20 p.

Beaulieu, N. et Tamba, A. Novembre 2005. Rapport sur le renforcement des capacités locales et la participation des acteurs au Sénégal, de Septembre 2003 á Novembre 2005.(80 kb) Rapport interne. CIAT/ISRA, Dakar, Sénégal.

Collaborators

Nathalie Beaulieu (CIAT-InforCom Project); Abdourahmane Tamba (Senegalese Institute for Agricultural Research [ISRA] and DMP National Coordinator for Senegal); Meissa Diouf and Cheikh Lô (ISRA-Center for Horticultural Development [CDH]); Ibrahima Diaïté (ISRA-National Center for Agronomic Research [CNRA] de Bambey); Samba Ndiaye (ISRA-National Center for Forestry Research [CNRF]); Maty Bâ Diao (ISRA-National Laboratory for animal husbandry and veterinary research [LNERV]); Khady Sow, Momodou Dione, Oumar Touré, Ibrahima Sadio, Modou Mbaye, Moustapha Mbaye, Mame Mor Gueye, Boubacar Ba, Samba Kante, Moussa Diallo, Momodou Camara (ANCAR), Ibrahima Diémé (Soils Bureau [BP] of the Senegalese Direction of Agriculture), Ababacar Diouf (Senegalese Direction of Agriculture), Abdoulaye Ndoye (Rural Expansion Centre [CERP] of Méouane), Doryan Colunge and Fabián Leonardo Cortés (CIAT-Information Systems Unit).