CREATE-ing Resilient Communities

Climate change-related problems have eroded ecosystems around the world, particularly in countries like Senegal in Africa. For people practicing subsistence agriculture in rural family farms in the country, climate change resulting in decreased rainfall, droughts and desertification has restricted water access for regenerative food production, causing worsened nutrition and economic outcomes. CREATE!s team implements participatory climate smart projects to develop solutions to these interconnected challenges, including tree planting programs to reduce deforestation and projects that use solar pumps with existing rehabilitated wells to improve perennial water access. Community members are trained to use that water for year-round food production in the desert-like Sahel region using sustainable regenerative techniques. While the food improves their nutrition, the income generated through the sale of surplus produce empowers them financially. Scaled globally, this solution will decrease use of fossil fuels while improving food security, nutrition and economic situation for the most vulnerable populations.

The specific problem that we are trying to solve within the challenge is opportunity creation for rural communities in the Sahel region of Africa, particularly Senegal, to improve their food security and income generation capacities through regenerative agriculture. These are communities where the annual dry season is nine months long. Agriculture is traditionally carried out during the short rainy season with nearly 90% of agricultural land worked by small-scale, family-based farms engaged in subsistence agriculture earning 300CFA ($0.50) per day to 1000CFA ($1.81) per day per farmer over the year, an amount that is less than the Global minimum of $1.90. Climate change, resulting in decreased rainfall, droughts and desertification has restricted water access further for agricultural production, impacting food security, nutrition and income generation adversely. The World Food Program estimates that 17% of people in Senegal are food insecure. Micronutrient deficiencies are also alarmingly high with 66% of children under 5 years and 54% of women of reproductive age being anemic. COVID-19 has intensified these problems with people in the rural informal sectors impacted the most. These are the population our solution aims to serve, with climate change effects being the main factor that our solution addresses.

CREATE!s solution is to use environmentally sustainable technologies and regenerative methods to improve food security and income opportunities for rural communities impacted by climate change. In rural Senegal, where sunlight is abundant and water is scarce, our climate smart projects harness this abundant solar energy in the form of solar water pumps to improve perennial water access from rehabilitated existing wells, and train women in the rural communities to use that water for year-round food production in the desert-like Sahel region. Women are also trained on agricultural techniques that conserve the ecosystem, like minimum tilling of the soil and using cover crops and straw to retain moisture, using livestock manure as fertilizers and to plant a diverse variety of indigenous crops using efficient irrigation methods. While the food produced improves their nutrition and helps break intergenerational malnutrition cycle, income generated through sale of surplus produce empowers them financially. This financial independence allows our project participants, especially the women, to become decision makers and develop entrepreneurial skills. Project participants have started individual small businesses with the income earned, be it their own farm stand or raising poultry in their backyard, thus scaling their economic opportunities further while protecting the environment.

The target population that our solution will directly serve are the rural population in the informal sector in Senegal, particularly farmers who can only practice subsistence agriculture during the very short rainy season in the country. Climate change, resulting in decreased rainfall has restricted their water access further for irrigation and food production. With less cultivation area and time, rural families concentrate more on cash crop cultivation to sustain them economically, leading to Senegal being a net importer of food crops. For poor rural households, this limits their ability to consume nutritious food since their economic situation does not allow them to always buy expensive imported food, thus impacting food security and nutrition adversely. This form of cash crop cultivation with focus on producing one species of crop leads to degradation of the soil and destruction of the ecosystem, while limiting income opportunities to only rainy season production possibilities.  As mentioned before, these farmers tend to earn less than the Global minimum per day, keeping them below the poverty line and restricting their economic situation. CREATE!s solution is to help these people not only have access to water yearlong to produce nutritious food year round, but also to have an opportunity to improve their economic situation through the sale of their excess agricultural production. Once the community members start earning income, they are trained on microfinance procedures that allow them to start saving their income and become entrepreneurs. Many women participants of CREATE!s project have started their own small scale family business with that income and savings, from farm stands to poultry to even small sewing businesses. This kind of entrepreneurship scales their economic opportunities further.

CREATE!s projects though are not based on a top down approach; rather, we believe in community driven partnerships that are designed to meet the basic needs of the rural population we partner with. In order to recognize and build on local knowledge and respond to the community’s requirements through techniques and technologies that are appropriate to their local conditions, the CREATE! team meets with the community leaders to discuss our programs and their specific needs before a partnership is finalized. Our Senegal staff also share some of the lived experience and sometimes the socio-economic status of our partner communities which allows our team’s work to resonate with the community’s needs. Once a community decides to partner with CREATE!, we emphasize their involvement in every stage of the project, from design to implementation and maintenance. Community members attend weekly or bi-weekly training sessions in sustainable agriculture, microfinance procedures, poultry production, and environment friendly improved cookstove maintenance. In addition, women work daily to care for growing vegetables in their cooperative gardens. The CREATE! technicians also collaborate with participants to establish management committees who are trained in the use and maintenance of the water wells, solar panels and solar pumps, and irrigation systems, all of which are essential in CREATE!s environmentally sustainable development plan.

The specific problem we are addressing is about climate change impacting scalable economic opportunities of rural Senegalese communities while sustaining resilient ecosystems. Climate change has restricted traditional growing seasons, leading communities to rely more on cash crop monoculture, destroying  soil, biodiversity and economic opportunities in the process. Our solar technology based solution allows communities to grow diverse range of indigenous vegetables throughout the year, using organic and regenerative practices like minimum tilling and multi-cropping that restores the soil and allows dietary diversity. Yearlong production allows communities to generate greater income, which then has multiplier effects on further income opportunities.

CREATE! has been implementing climate smart projects in rural Senegal for 10 years. Since initiating partnership with the community of Fass Koffe in 2010, we have partnered with 2-3 communities every year. Our program has been successfully established in 18 communities so far, with the 19th starting soon. In these years, we have directly trained more than 1000 women on sustainable regenerative agriculture, income generation, savings and lending techniques. Our projects have not only benefited the direct participants but also their families and the whole community indirectly, with nearly 18,000 people benefiting in total till date. While in the future we would like to scale our program efficiently in other countries through policy shifts and collaborative partnerships, at this point, our organization is poised for further growth within Senegal, replicating our development model in communities within the country who are facing similar needs as our current partner communities.

CREATE!s solution is innovative because it connects green energy with existing infrastructure in rural Africa to solve the problem of water and food scarcity in an environmentally sustainable manner. For the rural population in Senegal experiencing droughts and desertification, the long dry season has relegated agriculture to subsistence level cash crop monoculture during the short rainy season, impacting yearlong food production and ecosystems. Drilling bore holes for water is expensive; so is buying water from the commercial water towers, especially for agricultural purposes. But Senegal has thousands of traditional abandoned wells dotting the country. CREATE!s solution rehabilitates these already existing wells with an untapped potential for clean water and couples it with solar pumping systems to ensure that communities have access to perennial clean water for agricultural cultivation without depleting natural resources. Farmers can now grow organic, fresh and nutritious vegetables throughout the year in CREATE! cooperative gardens while growing cash crops in their family farms during the rainy season. In this way, the communities are produce more, consume more and sell their surplus produce yearlong, earning a higher income over the year. Our solution is also unique because it strikes a balance between economic and environmental issues, teaching the participants the importance of conserving the ecosystem while taking charge of their economic futures. CREATE!s solutions to challenges faced by rural villages in Senegal thus do not come at an environmental cost; rather, responsible and long-lasting changes can be made that benefit communities as well as the local environment

The number of people our program is directly serving currently is 904 women and men in our 18 communities who partnered with CREATE!. These are the community members who directly participate in our project activities and receive training on sustainable agriculture and income generation. The program indirectly but meaningfully benefits an estimated 17,000 more people in these communities, improving their access to clean water and impacting their health, nutrition and livelihoods. In one year, our direct beneficiary number is estimated to be 1,000 with 19,000 more people being impacted indirectly. In five years, those same numbers are estimated to reach 1,200 and 23,000 respectively.

CREATE! recognizes and values the insights gained through the monitoring and evaluation of our community-based development programs in rural Senegal. We strive to refine our program activities based on collected data, to better meet the needs of our partner communities. Currently, our monitoring and evaluation is divided into two streams. Our technicians’ monitor and report data on our program indicators from the field while our communications team does the same from the households in the communities through surveys and testimonial interviews. Baseline data for all relevant indicators are collected for any new partner community. The household surveys are conducted quarterly and the field reports and testimonials are submitted every month. The data is then analyzed and evaluated to help us understand the effect and progress of our work on the ground.

To measure our impact, some of the performance indicators that we focus on and their envisaged results that inform our program impact are as follows:

• Number of people mobilized and trained in each community: 50-75
• Average production of nutritious vegetables per month: 300 pounds
• Percentage of women aged 15-49 years achieving Minimum Dietary Diversity: 98%
• Average income earned by each participant through sale of their excess vegetable production and poultry: $30
• Average savings of each participant every month through microfinance institutions: $20
• Number of trees planted every year: 20,000

These estimated numbers are based on impact already achieved in CREATE!s partner communities and helps measure our progress towards our goals every year.

Full time staff: 17, including Executive Director, Country Director, agricultural technicians, field coordinator and communications and monitoring staff

Part time: 2, including Development Associate and Communications Coordinator

CREATE!s solutions are implemented in Senegal by our all Senegalese staff led by our Country Director, Omar Seck, who is responsible for overall operations and supervision of the Senegal staff and their activities.  Seck is skilled in project management and accountancy and has ten years of professional experience. Our Field Coordinator, Amadou Diouf coordinates the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all activities and training programs in the communities and oversees the work of all our field technicians. Diouf is professionally trained in horticulture and served as a practical work teacher before joining CREATE! and has eight years of professional experience. All our agricultural technicians are professionally trained from various institutes in Senegal and are responsible for training and assisting project participants in all aspects of CREATE!s programs. Our Senegal staff share some of the lived experience and sometimes the socio-economic status of our partner communities. With people from both rural and urban settings in our staff, we have a diverse mix of thoughts and experiences that helps our team’s work resonate with the community’s needs. The team works together with community members in formulating program activities, involving them in every stage of the project, from design to implementation and maintenance. They also foster a sense of ownership of the project among members and train them so they can manage their projects without ongoing financial support and technical guidance from CREATE! in the future. Michael Carson, CREATE!s Executive Director supervises the overall operations and helps fundraise in US for our programs.

CREATE! has a non-discrimination policy that stipulates that the organization does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability, genetic information or national origin, in any of its employment practices, programs, or other activities. We make a special effort to have a gender balance in our staff, as we believe that women are the drivers of change. Our leadership team is built around that ideology, with almost all of our staff, and particularly our Executive Director and Country Director being people of color or U.S. ethnic minorities (African-American and Senegalese). Omar Seck, our Country Director ensures that the team in Senegal are diverse and inclusive, with about half of CREATE!s technicians and communications staff being women who train the project participants while motivating them. According to Codou Gadji, our longest serving female technician, “The women are very motivated when they have a female technician training them. They know it is possible to do this work because they see us doing it.”

CREATE!s US team is made up of people form diverse backgrounds too with our Executive Director being an African-American and our Development Associate a first generation Indian-American woman. Our Board of Directors is comprised of 4 women and 4 men, with two members from the African countries of Senegal and Niger, all of whom are committed to upholding the spirit of our non-discrimination policy.

CREATE! is applying to Solve for the following reasons:

• To secure funding for our solution in order to help more communities become resilient in the face of climate change
• To spread the word about CREATE! and our work
• To receive Monitoring and Evaluation support to better measure our impact
• To connect with other impact-minded social enterprises and leaders and learn from them about solving global issues

We believe that we require support refining our business model that will enable us to expand our work to more communities and countries and eventually scale our work through government adoption of our women's climate action and economic livelihoods approaches, and outreach to women's groups and NGOs in Senegal and neighboring countries.

CREATE! has strong monitoring and evaluation (M & E) systems. We can benefit from reaching technical assistance and funding to digitize our M & E systems. We have reviewed smart-phone and PC-based M & E systems like Taroworks. Our vision is to equip our technicians with Taroworks on their smart phones. Our technicians would enter data on their smart phones as opposed to manually. Information would be transmitted from technician's smartphones to our Communications Coordinator and Grants Manager at our Oregon headquarters. We will seek mentoring from NGOs experienced in M & E technology and processes.

Finally, we are interested in partnering with foundations and impact investors that share our mission to invest in women's climate action that are committed to invest in, critically assess and guide us on improving our model. 

We are interested in partnering with Solve experts in sustainable food systems to advise us on refining our approach. We are interested in partnering with foundations and impact investors that critically assess NGO solutions and that can guide us on improving our model. We would like to partner with foundations that provide technical and managerial advice in addition to funding to refine our approaches and receive advice on transforming some of our women's group farms into training hubs that will enable CREATE! to share our experiences and eventually scale our approach to other communities throughout Senegal and West Africa. 

CREATE! is qualified to receive the Innovation for Women Prize due to our ten years' experience delivering climate smart innovative approaches to improve life and livelihoods of women in our partner communities in rural Senegal. Through our technical advice and investment in Senegalese communities, we have provided year-round access to water and training on sustainable regenerative agriculture using solar technology to over 1000 women directly and their families indirectly. This has enabled the women to produce nutritious food year-round, improving their and their families' health and well-being. CREATE! has also trained women on marketing their excess produce in local weekly markets, improving their economic situation and helping them break free of the poverty cycle. We have mobilized women to establish village savings and lending associations and trained them on microfinance techniques. The training led women in our 18 partner communities to produce 13 tons of vegetables in 2020 with 100% women of reproductive age achieving Minimum Dietary Diversity, a verifiable nutrition indicator and each participant earning and saving $20 per month. This financial independence empowered women to become decision makers and develop entrepreneurial skills: participants started individual small businesses and installed drip irrigation systems in the community garden.

We would use the Innovation for Women Prize to invest in technology like smartphones equipped with M & E and GIS systems to improved our Monitoring and Evaluation systems. This new technology will allow our team to understand and advance the impact of our programs better.