Onions from Holland

These last few weeks, onions have been a bit scarce here in Burkina Faso. Prices are up, and I even started seeing onions imported from Holland on the markets! How frustrating! We work with people growing onions during the winter, and when they sell at the end of the season the prices usually hit rock-bottom or you may even have trouble finding buyers. Everyone sells their onions at the same time. That's why we are working with conservation methods: if you can keep your onions in good shape for a few months you can get really good prices, and we won't need to import onions from the other end of the world.

My job

I realise that I haven’t really described what I am doing here, in detail. In truth, it took a while to find out for myself. But I think after about half a year I have a clear idea.

My title is “chargé de mise en valeur”, which means responsible for the valorisation activities. The programme I am working in has activities in water availability (such as the provision of water wells), but also, once water is available, activities to capitalise this for the development of the area or village are possible. The most important examples of these activities are vegetable growing and rice production.

Vegetable and rice production are commercial agricultural activities, and not easy. First of all there are all the technical aspects: production techniques, the weather which we can’t control, and constraints on water and inputs availability. Giving villagers willing to produce vegetables or rice the knowledge how to do so is one of the main activities in this aspect. But once harvesting time comes around, another aspect appears: commercialisation. It is not enough to grow onions, to make a living you have to be able to sell them too! And this is an aspect with which we are struggling with right now.

It is a difficult subject, because the world of food production is becoming increasingly globalised and producers here have to compete with rice from taiwan and tomatoes from ghana. We are looking at ways to try and make these agricultural activities profitable and sustainable for these small farmers we are working with. Not an easy task, but interesting and challenging...

Women and water

March 8th is the worlds day for celebrating women. March 22nd is world water day. What do these two have to do with eachother? I joined a course on gender in drinking water provision, sanitation and hygiene at CREPA (Centre Regional d'Eau Potable et Assainissement) in Ouagadougou to find out more...

In Burkina Faso, as in much of the developing world, water is a womans business. Getting water from the well, storing it at home, cooking and cleaning, washing clothes and taking care of the children... many water-related tasks are performed by women. Yet, during the decision-making process, men usually dominate. And as is the case with many other development issues, we are learning that solutions that do not include all stakeholders into the decision-making process are not the most effective.

In the case of our organization (PGE), we work with putting in place committee to manage a source of water. For example, a village well should have a committee consisting of a president, a secretary, a treasurer, a maintenance person and a hygienist. Together this team should take care of the well, keep it running and clean. Now imagine that almost the whole committee consists of men, while the well is used for 90% by women... can that work? In our work we are trying to include women in these committees, but this is not an easy process. Also, numeric representation does not automatically guarantee participation. So, a course in gender, to get some ideas.

During two weeks, me and a group of wonderful, funny and smart people worked on this topic. We brainstormed, discussed and laughed. Almost all of the participants were Burkinabe, so my ideas on how to include gender aspects did not always stroke with the groups', but that's also an important issue to think of: solutions need to be locally adapted to fit. So the Burkinabe way it was! :-)

After an introduction to the concepts and issues in gender and water, a field trip was organized in order to allow us to collect data in a gender-sensitive fashion. For this field trip, CREPA had asked us (PGE) if they could come visit one of our intervention villages. So off to Zandkoom we all went! We infiltrated the village with our questions, testing different approaches and tools, turning issues around and trying to get a grip on the local reality. Afterwards, we worked with this material designed a project to deal with the villages water-related issues in a gender-sensitive way.

After these two weeks, I think I can recapitulate what we learned in a few rules-of-thumb... gender means:

- including all groups, taking care not to exclude the weaker ones: men, women, young, old, disabled, illiterate...
- sex is biological, gender is a social and cultural construct. thus, working with gender needs to be done in a way which is adapted to the local society and culture
- working with gender is essentially working with human behavior.... in other words, patience is highly recommended

Back at work, I hope I will be able to facilitate the discussion on how we can work with gender in our program and in the future.

picture: field work: looking at the sanitation and water situation in a village, with gender glasses on