The third season of construction in our Pilot Village Deployment Program (PVDP) around Dendjola is just coming to an end, with excellent results:
- 9 buildings completed, composed in total of 19 vaults (thus, an average of 2 vaults per building),
- a total length of vaults, if put end-to-end, of 111 meters
- 5 new apprentices in training.
The driving forces behind this progress have been the local 'champion' Siaka Djiré, who has also played a major role in spreading the word about the AVN program to neighboring villages, and the NV master-mason Ibrahim Mien, who has himself supervised all 9 building sites and acted as the main channel of communication with the clients. Another important factor in the growth of the program has been the catalytic effect of building village mosques using the NV technique: everyone helps in providing manual labor for these community buildings, and they act as powerful demonstration sites for the quality and durability of the NV technique, prompting villagers to ask for houses to be built in the same way.
The three photos show examples of the constructions from this 2010/11 season.
Financial support for part of this season's program has come from the Dutch Triodos Foundation, and from the BICIM Bank in Mali (part of the BNP Paribas Group), but AVN is still looking for funding for the fourth year of the Dendjola PVDP, and for extension of the Program in Mali to neighboring regions. Any help you can provide will be much appreciated...
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The 2010/11 construction season in the Sahel is now drawing to a close, as the rains will be starting next month. The results are very promising, and demonstrate how successfully the program is growing. The 400 or so NV masons and apprentices have built this season, since September 2010, the equivalent of 1800 linear meters of vaults in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal, namely 124 buildings made up in total of 255 vaults, each of an average length of 7 meters and the standard internal width of 3,25 meters:
- in Burkina Faso: 82 buildings (= 130 vaults)
- in Mali: 37 buildings ( = 102 vaults)
- in Senegal : 5 large buildings (= 23 vaults).
This season has also seen the first NV house built for a client using micro-credit facilities organised by the NGO Entrepeneurs du monde in collaboration with AVN. This is a small house in the village of Koper, near Dano, Burkina Faso, for Mme Sophie Somda (see photos). We hope that this initiative will encourage other villagers to make use of affordable micro-credit loans to help obtain better housing for their families.
In Europe, the growing reputation of our NGO Association la voute nubienne (AVN) has recently been recognised by the award of the Social Enterprise Trophy (International category) to Thomas Granier, co-founder of AVN. This trophy, organised by the French newspaper La Tribune, with the support of the bank BNP-Paribas, is awarded to the most promising social enterprise organizations in France - AVN was selected by a jury of professionals from 120 other candidates for this award.
Despite this growing international recognition for our work, we still need all the help and support we can get to maintain the momentum of growth in the Program.... there are still millions of families in the Sahel living under terrible housing conditions. We have made a small dent in the problem, but we are still in the early stages of creating a sustainable market in decent, safe, housing for rural families.
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The PZDP (Pilot Zone Deployment Program) started three years ago in the little village of Dendjola, in partnership with local villagers, is proving to be a great success, with more houses and mosques built during the current construction season. The program is now spreading to 22 other villages in the zone around Dendjola.
The ’champion’ of this PVDP is the Imam of the Dendjola mosque, Siaka Djiré, and the AVN master mason in charge of the programme is Ibrahim Dien (see photo below of Ibrahim and his team of masons and apprentices inn Dendjola).
Ibrahim has designed and overseen the construction of four village mosques - important centres and meeting places for the village communities (see photos below of mosques in Marmarila and Coucou villages, near Dendjola). In addition, a dozen houses have been built (= 33 vaults in total, for the mosques and houses, equivalent to 227 linear meters of vaults), 5 masons have been trained, and there are 14 villagers currently undertaking apprenticeships with AVN master masons.
The success of this program over the last two years has confirmed our belief in the validity and replicability of the PZDP strategy, not only in the immediate locality of the villages involved, but also at a regional level: requests from other village centres (Oueta, Koutialia, Segou, and Macina) for similar programs are already in the pipeline (see photo below of a meeting in Oueta village, where an AVN mason is explaining the advantages of VN construction to a group of villagers). And the strategy was the key element in our successful bid for support from the World Bank, and in gaining financial sponsorship and support from the Dutch Triodos Foundation, and from the Malian Bank BICIM.
You can be sure that any help that you can provide through Global Giving to support the growth of our programs in Mali will be of great benefit to the village families involved, helping them to gain decent, comfortable, safe, and sustainable housing - as opposed to trying to raise their children in tin-roofed shacks.
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