Concern Universal Gambia, Senegal, Guinea Bissau Annual Report 2015-16

Country Summary:

Over 20 years’ supporting sustainable development in The Gambia and Senegal

Senegal & Gambia

Senegambia Annual report 2015-16 Concern Universal Concern Universal Senegambia is one of nine Concern Universal country programmes. Concern Universal is an international development organisation tackling poverty from the grassroots. We create opportunities for people around the world to improve their lives and shape their own futures. By building skills and connecting people at all levels in society, we help communities deliver practical solutions with long term impact.

Working with partner organisations, we support community projects that improve livelihoods, reduce vulnerability and promote greater equality. To achieve this, we also influence policy, pioneer business partnerships and engage public support for our approach.

Our Vision: A world where justice, dignity and respect prevail for all Our Mission: To work in partnership to challenge poverty and inequality. We support practical actions that enable people to improve their lives and shape their own futures.

Concern Universal The Gambia & Senegal P.O. Box 2164 Serrekunda The Gambia BP 25448, Dakar - Fann. Senegal

Concern Universal Senegambia is a leading international development and humanitarian aid organization, specialising in Livelihoods, Resilience and strengthening local organisations to respond to their own needs. We work closely with local communities and Gambian, Senegalese and Guinea Bissau organisations to understand and respond to priority needs. We focus on building the capacity of Gambian & Senegal organisations, and sustainable solutions that mobilise resources and encourage entrepreneurialism.

Funding Partners USAID DFID & other donors AGRA – Scaling Seeds & Technology Partnership BIG Lottery Fund UK European Union ECOWAS United States Embassy Banjul, Gambia Oxfam America Australian Aid Electric Aid UMCOR In the ICT Agriculture Extension Challenge we work in Consortium with: -Practical Action -SBC4D -University of California Santa Cruz -ADG

In 2015, we worked with 24 local partners, the Government, civil society and the private sector; Channelling around 63 million GMD ($1.5m USD) of development aid to help almost

Contact: Tel: +220 439 6071 /+220 4397 648 email: tony.jansen@concern-universal.org Website: www.concern-universal.org/gambia Reports: https://issuu.com/concernuniversal

Concern Universal, 21 King St, Hereford, HR4 9BX, UK. Tel +44 (0)1432 355111. www.concern-universal.org. Registered as a Charity No: 272465

281,660 people improve their lives. for people, for good

Concern Universal:

We are guided by our experience of 23 years’ practical development in partnership with Gambian and Senegalese people and organisations to focus on these areas. They represent where we understand that we can help the most people in the most important ways.

Senegambia

Welcome 2015 was a year of growth with solid progress on implementing our 2014-2019 strategic plan. In the region there was a good rain season & optimistic harvests but many ongoing challenges and vulnerabilities remain for the poor. In Casamance there is a real sense that lasting peace may finally be achievable but tensions are forests have escalated. Our focus on livelihoods, poverty reduction and reducing tension over natural resources like forests remains critical and has expanded. In Guinea Bissau there is fragile stability and increasing optimism and a good space for livelihoods and capacity building of civil society is emerging.

The migration ‘crisis’ from the Sahel to Europe grabbed headlines and donor attention in 2015 – in response we have been showcasing our partners solutions for youth employment, rural and urban livelihoods as proven alternatives.

We supported innovation in livelihoods and capacity building in 2015: a pilot project with Waste AID to develop jobs around reprocessing waste in urban areas working with WIG and local authorities in Gambia; a consortium called TICmbay is developing new ways to communicate with farmers in Senegal and make wide reaching radio more interactive; we worked with CSOs to build their ICT capacity and help them improve their presence online - an increasingly important area for civil society. An impact study confirmed our 8 years of work in Upper River Region with WASDA supporting communities to establish farmer run rice irrigation is economically, socially and environmentally sustainable and ready to be taken to scale. Modeling showed the existing 82 hectares could sustainably be expanded on up to 6000 hectares and transform the lives and food security of tens of thousand of poor farmers in a region with the highest migration to Europe.

Our sub-regional expansion has progressed this year. We now have national coverage in Senegal across six regions, opening sub offices in Dakar & Bignona, and we are pushing hard to get our first project in Guinea Bissau. I think 2016-17 will be a year of consolidating the gains & learning we have made in recent years.

I look forward to leading the program and our team in this direction.

Improved agricultural producCvity and farm incomes In the Senegambia Region, thousand of vulnerable people (60 to 70% of the population) depend on agriculture and rural livelihoods. They rely on depleting environmental resources (eg soil and forests) and are confronted with climate induced crisis as well as economic challenges. In the Casamance region of Senegal, the situation is exacerbated by the long running & low intensity separatist conflict while the north is threatened by creeping desertification. Livelihoods are being undermined and threaten people’s resilience, their food and nutritional security and accentuates youth illegal migration to Europe and elsewhere.

We are working to break this critical cycle by proactively building the resilience capacity of our partners, the people/farmers and communities to effectively handle the situation. In 2015 with our partners we supported the training of 39,409 farmers in agricultural best practices, enabled 1,722 f people to establish or strengthen their farm and off farm business, 993 people issued with micro finance loans, or were helped to access micro finance from other providers, enabled communities to put 97 hectares of land under year round rice or vegetable production and 25 youth took the opportunity to engage in livestock farming and off farm enterprises.

These interventions enabled 20,189 people to attain an increase in cash income, 1832 to attain increased yields in rice, grains, groundnuts and vegetables among others. Above all, these successes has made it possible for 24,251 people to attain a decrease in their hungry months from either 8 to 4 or 8 to zero months. CU and partners also supported individuals/communities to plant 99,700 trees, 315 have acquired and adopted the use of fuel wood efficient stoves and raised the awareness of 52,386 people to have an increase understanding on environmental issues such as soil fertility and protection, environmental protection and reforestation.

Resilience Resilience is now one of our three strategic focus areas in this sub region.

Despite the efforts made by governments, the Ebola virus disease continued to be a threat to both lives and livelihoods of people in the sub-region but thankfully is nearing its end. Concern Universal and its partners worked during the past 12 months to reduce the risk of Ebola transmission in 2 regions of the Gambia - reaching around 8000 people. This was mainly public health promotion delivered through social mobilization activities through house-to-house sensitization; radio programs and jingles, production of hygiene materials, and training of community health volunteers across the country. The end of project evaluation noted that 97.4% of the study participants recognized that you can considerably prevent yourself from Ebola infection with regular hand washing with soap and water at key times –contributing to wider hygiene behaviour change that will have many ongoing benefits.

In 2015 we contributed the resilience of vulnerable households in the Gambia through support to households whose under 5 children have deteriorating nutrition status in the Central River Region of the Gambia which itself plunged to having the worse nutrition status in the country. This support was through kitchen gardening and cooking demonstration; a women driven seed network program and soil and crop diversity trials and management that benefited about 1160 mostly women beneficiaries. An example of the outcome is that among 21 children that were between the age 0 to 1 years old average weight improved for all. In the coming year we are planning to do some new work on capacity building of partners and government institutions on quality WASH and EFSL, capacity assessment, local leadership, campaign and influencing, women’s right and gender justice.

Tony Jansen Country Director Gambia - Senegal

InnovaCon Results

A lot of innovation has been happening in the program in 2015.

Resilient lives

impact

257,401people

Better Health

impact

10,450 people

Upholding Rights

impact

13,810 people

In total 281,661 people in Gambia and Senegal were directly assisted to improve their lives, with improved food security, better health, greater respect for rights, and less vulnerability.

As part of our resilience program we are working with small farmers to increase production and reduce vulnerability for rain fed grain crops that are mostly grown for home consumption. We conducted over 1000 farmer led trials in real life conditions – of ’improved’ varieties of grain crops compared to traditional varieties and with different fertility inputs to the soil (no inputs, animal manure and a waste product millet husks that is normally burned). We found the combination of a low level of organic and a high level of NPK is often twice as effective as using NPK alone & a low level of organic inputs and a low level of NPK often has the same effect as a high level of NPK, but is much cheaper. Significant yield increases can be attained at little or no cost to the farmer.

We developed a strong focus on ICTs and development: In Senegal Jokalante is a social enterprise we are supporting to provide ICT services based around delivery of information and collection of responses in local language and by voice – an approach more suited to the poor and women. In Gambia we developed tools and process to assess capacity of NGOs in IT, build their capacity, and a competitive fund helped dozens of organisations to get online.

Building Capacity We believe that strengthening civil society is vital to building sustainable & equitable societies. During 2015 capacity building included: 85 women vegetable kafos (groups) with 10,150 vegetable growers in Central River Region North and South of Gambia trained as marketing kafos. This enabled them to take common decision on marketing. The groups later formed two Marketing Federations and received training in group management & advocacy on womens rights. In Upper River Region 73 groups also formed a marketing federation with 8,000 mostly women members. An voice based market price information system was built and 400 women receive weekly market information and share with group members. This has reduced the incidence of middle men or women given them false information about the market.

In the Fogni area of Senegal & Gambia 17 CBO’s have joined a capacity building program linked to livelihood sub grants: 9 partners did self assessments and developed their own organisational development plans. We formed new partnerships in 2015: with FANGSOTO , a farmers Federation in Gambia; RESOPP a national farmers cooperative umbrella with 30,000 members in eight regional cooperatives across Senegal, URIS a seed producer group in Matam and continue working with 17 CSOs in Casamance and Fogni Gambia forming a cross border network.

An example of how this work helps women’s lives:100 vegetable garden groups developed business plans and used those plans to access finance to improve their vegetable production and negotiate collectively for better prices.