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Development 360 the dam was a bad idea. “Look, here in Rosso, we always drink that water, we bathe in that water,” Working Towards the Millennium Development Goals THE WORLD BANK Diagne says, pointing to the river where women and men are unloading the morning’s fishing haul from a wooden pirogue. “That means disease for us. I have bilharzias because of the dam.” Senegal: River Lifeline But Dha Sow, also 31, a currency changer at the ferry depot, overhears the conversation and interrupts. “No, no, no,” he says, shaking his head. “With the dam, we’re better off than before. We can cultivate throughout the year, rice, tomatoes—it doesn’t matter if it’s the wet or dry season.” Diagne retorts: “You’re talking about farming; I’m talking about disease.” The exchange sets off a murmur of conversa- tions among a small crowd of onlookers. Later, Sow seeks out the visitor to reiterate his points. “Before, Banda Diang works these fields in the Senegal the salty water limited our farming,” he explains. “Now we can harvest three or four times a year. And River delta every day, from about eight in the morning until six at night, breaking for a lunch of rice we have potable water all the time.” and fish that one of his seven children brings him. A turban wrapped around NOUAKCHOTT IBRD 33101 his head to protect against the sun, Diang heaves a hoe into the black loamy MAURITANIA Modifying Habits, Monitoring Change soil and ticks off a list of the crops it yields him. Rosso And so the debate plays out. Across the river, in Rosso, Mauritania, the OMVS has set up a series of pi- “I grow potatoes, onions, lettuce,” says the 62-year-old farmer, his words Dagana S lot projects to combat bilharzias in the villages that dot the sun-scorched plains. In Keur Mour, a dusty e n punctuated with the thuds of his hoe hitting the earth. “Okra and carrots,” he e g a settlement of thatch-roofed homes, villagers are digging latrine pits. Each l R continues. “Turnips, beets, cassava.” Another hoe thud, and Diang spits into DAKAR . family’s home will get one, as well as a shower. Keur Mour also has a brand- SENEGAL “Development is always going his hands to moisten his grip. “I can even grow fruit, like mangos.” new water tank and pump, the tallest structure in the village. to have good and bad effects. MALI BANJUL THE GAMBIA It’s a matter of making sure “The pilot health projects deal with how to reduce, as much as possible, con- Wresting a Living From the River that the positive outweighs the tact between local people and water from the river. If the people don’t go into This part of northern Senegal was not always so bounteous. Salt and brackish negative.” the river, there won’t be bilharzias,” says Ndiaye, the OMVS’s environmental water used to seep up to 200 kilometers upstream. As a result, agriculture was limited; moreover, per- monitoring chief. “That means ensuring that all the villages have access to sistent droughts made farming an unstable and precarious livelihood. In 1986, the Organisation pour la pumped water, and that if people need to go to the toilet, they use latrines. If they want to take a Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Senegal (Senegal River Development Organization, OMVS)—a union of Mali, shower, they use water from the tap, etc.” Mauritania, and Senegal, which all share the 1,800-kilometer river—built the Diama Dam a few kilome- ters inland from where the river empties into the Atlantic Ocean. The organization will keep track of progress in Keur Mour and other pilot villages in reducing bilharzias infection, comparing results here with other villages where they are distributing free medicine that The dam blocks saltwater from entering the delta, opening up vast opportuni- combats the parasite. “If the latter have better results than the former, then we’ll know that it’s nearly ties for irrigated agriculture. “The dam has been very useful because we can impossible, culturally, to avoid going to the river, because they have many traditional activities they grow all year round,” says Diang. That kind of stable environment allows carry out there,” Ndiaye says. farmers to grow a much wider range of crops. With financing from the World Bank and other donors, OMVS created in 2000 the environmental Diang has done well enough for himself that last year he was able to purchase monitoring unit that Ndiaye heads to gather and track data on several indicators, such as disease infec- new plots. He now owns 25 hectares of land. He says he can clear a profit of tion, to gauge how well the organization is counteracting the negative impacts of the two dams. up to 200,000 Central African francs (about $400) in one harvest. “Before the Ndiaye’s group is part of a larger program that also appor- dam, I wouldn’t have made that kind of money,” Diang says. tions money for small poverty reduction projects in the basin. Project Results at a Glance Five years ago, he joined a local farmers’ cooperative, one of dozens in the Ndiaye, who has a youthful face and speaks in a rapid, high- Senegal River valley formed with the help of OMVS. When farmers pool their Title: Senegal River Basin Water and pitched staccato, is an environmental specialist with experi- produce, they can fetch higher prices. A co-op also has more clout in getting Environmental Management Project ence in several development projects in Senegal. He takes a loans from banks which wouldn’t consider the farmers creditworthy as indi- Initiated: Late 2003 frank but optimistic outlook about overcoming the challenges viduals. Diang’s group hasn’t bid for a credit line yet. “But if I had some, I’d buy facing the OMVS. “Development is always going to have good a tractor to do this work,” he adds, pointing to the upturned earth at his feet. World Bank grant: $5.26 million and bad effects,” says Ndiaye. “It’s a matter of making sure Total project cost: $21.2 million that the positive outweighs the negative.” Taming the River—Together The Diama Dam and the Manantali Dam—the latter built in 1988 on a tribu- Goal: Fund small community-based tary of the Senegal River in western Mali—form the linchpins of the OMVS’s Banda Diang farms the fields in the Senegal environmental projects Story written by Craig Mauro. Photos by Scott Wallace. strategy for the river basin. Before the dams were built, people living along River Delta; he finds the dam useful because he can grow crops all year round. 4 Senegal: River Lifeline For more information about this and other Development 360 stories, please contact Margaret Bergen at [email protected]. the river depended on the fickle cycles of rainfall and flooding to cultivate crops. In the river’s valley freshwater. About 1,200 kilometers away in Mali, the multipurpose Manantali and delta, rainfall rarely exceeds 500 millimeters a year, and even that amount varies erratically. Dam also feeds irrigation networks. The two dams and a system of dikes in the river system allow the OMVS to control the river’s level, thus eliminating The Senegal River flows for 1,800 kilometers, beginning in Guinea and emptying into the Atlantic flooding. Ocean. About 11 percent of the river basin’s 300,000 square kilometers lie in Guinea, 53 percent in Mali, 26 percent in Mauritania, and 10 percent in Senegal. The river’s flow depends mostly on rains World Bank loans to each OMVS member helped finance the construction of a that fall in the Fouta Djallon mountain region of Guinea. power plant at Manantali, which since 2001 has supplied the three countries with about 800 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. That’s enough to keep Prolonged droughts and a steady decline in rainfall in the 1960s and 1970s the lights on year-round in Dakar, Nouakchott, and Bamako, the capitals of the devastated the natural resource base: soils were degraded and eroded, surface Tamsir Ndiaye heads up environmental moni- three OMVS countries. toring at OMVS—a union of Mali, Mauritania, OMVS has evolved into one of water dried up, shrubs and other vegetation disappeared, and grazing pas- and Senegal, which all share the 1,800-kilo- the world’s leading examples tures withered away. Famine and malnutrition ravaged the local populations, In Mali, which now runs fully on hydroelectric power, the price of energy for meter river—and built the Diama Dam. of several governments jointly sparking an exodus of migrants to larger cities and Europe. consumers has dropped 30 percent. Senegal and Mauritania have not lowered managing a shared water their prices yet, as they’re trying to recoup investment costs. But having a stable and reliable supply of In 1972, the governments of Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali formed the OMVS resource. power in all three capital cities has innumerable benefits. to manage—together—the river’s use and to solve the problem of food and economic security for the people who live along it. The organization has Power outages used to happen nearly every day, Ndiaye notes. “If you put some meat or fish in the re- evolved into one of the world’s leading examples of several governments jointly managing a shared frigerator, it could spoil. You’d show up at your office, but there’d be no electricity so you can’t work. In water resource. Guinea is now being integrated into the OMVS under a World Bank-financed project.

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