By Seydou Traore | Executive Director
This project report is a submission to GlobalGiving's 2017 Fail Forward Contest, where organizations are asked to share a story of when they tried something new that didn't go as planned and how they learned from it. Enjoy!
Community Building Group Ltd is helping villagers in Africa with satellite imagery to locate a suitable area where to build rainwater catchment basin at low cost. After we built two basins in the village of Kamsi and Sissene, we are now retrofitting the basins with irrigation system powered with solar energy to support women socioeconomic activities.
We found that the rainwater catchment basin alone won't be sufficient to increase productivity and provide incomes to women. So, we include small scale irrigation farming system using solar energy technology. A lesson learned is to always include local communities in any design during the development of a project. It has helped us so far to sustain all our projects, as villagers understood the value of ultimate goals of the project, their own tasks and involvement in the work. We found that a non participatory project has a risk of failure. We tried a focus group participatory discussion to bottom up problem and water and energy were the highest priority area in our case.
Here is the fact of a recent accomplishment:
https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/make-water-available-every-day-for-6000-villagers/reports/#menu
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