By Tony Kaye | Member, AVN Management Committee
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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