At Growing Life, we mainstream reproductive health and rights into agriculture.
Thérèse Mayé Diouf Ba is setting up an NGO called “Growing Life”. Growing Life aims to fight seasonal exodus of young girls; prevent teenage pregnancy and early marriage by fighting poverty and economic dependence.
Growing Life targets adolescent girls or their mothers. In Senegal, we have a phenomenon called “seasonal exodus” which consists of young girls, as young as 10and 12 years old, from rural communities, in Senegal, being sent to Dakar, or other urban cities, to work as maids during the school holidays. This allows the girls to gain some money to buy school supplies and clothes. However, very often, these little girls return back to their communities with pregnancies or are abused, either physically or psychologically, and not counting the incalculable hours of work they do during a period where they are supposed to be resting after a whole school year.
At Growing Life, we mainstream reproductive health and rights into agriculture, in other words, we have set up an integrated farm where girls, who are already outside of the education system, are being trained in agro ecology and agro business. For a set period of time they are provided with a piece of land and trained in organic farming and the processing of their harvest with a zero waste policy. Conventions will be signed between the project and institutions for either the commercialization of girls’ produce or recruitment of the girls who are out off school.
For the adolescent candidates that are often part of the exodus to gain some money, our goal is to keep them at school. We enroll the mothers of the adolescent girls, provide them with a piece of land on our farm and train them. Also, we network with municipalities for access to land for all those who are successfully trained.
So far, the farm is set and the majority of the infrastructure has been installed through our own funds. We have recruited workers and have started growing vegetables to fund the first activities. Our objective is not to wait for, or solely depend on, donors but to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is a main value we want to instill while also scaling-up the use of existing resources in order to succeed
Visit our facebook page, Growing life Farm!
Leave a Reply