If you want to walk fast, walk alone.  But if you want to walk far, walk together.

Anyone who has worked in development comes to understand how complex it can be to help someone pull themselves out of poverty. Lack of education, lack of capital, burdensome living conditions, lack of health care, the list goes on.  If you are malnourished, or sick, how can you learn?  Or work?  And if you are not educated, how can you get access to capital?  The issues intersect, and reinforce each other. 

So when we started GambiaRising it was not an obvious choice to keep things simple and focus on just one issue: education (and especially girls' education).  We made that choice partly because we knew it was one issue that would not only make a huge, and enduring, difference, but unlike many development programs, it had zero downside. The risk of dependency that crushes so many well-meaning programs was minimal because those we helped were already at dependent points in their lives, and our aid would have a natural end point. Focusing on scholarships also made our program easy to scale to the amount of income we had each year, and keeping it simple meant all of that income could be used to support students, since we could work on the ground through a motivated team of volunteer coordinators working in their own communities. 

What we and our donors have accomplished together since then is astonishing to me. The way our donors have continued to support our program year after year has allowed us to use new funds to support more students, and this compound effect has led to more than 1,500 young Gambians being in school this year with our support.  Each of whose lives will never be the same because of the chance our donors gave them.

Something else has happened that we did not anticipate or expect. Perhaps we should have, because when a group of motivated and effective people achieve remarkable results, opportunities come their way. Although we chose to stay focused on the urgent need to help young people get an education, we can't help but see the other problems stifling people's futures. And so we and our Gambian team have welcomed finding ways to empower others to help Gambians outside the scope of our work removing barriers to education.  Let me fill you in on two of these, because none of them would have happened had GambiaRising not existed.

When I was Peace Corps Country Director in 2007-9, I heard about a new water program called Water Charity (not to be confused with the hugely-funded, Hollywood-connected Charity:Water).  Water Charity worked out of the limelight, didn't spend money on advertising. But it was incredibly effective, in large part because they implemented their water and sanitation projects through Peace Corps volunteers. Peace Corps/The Gambia immediately jumped on this program and during my time in the country, tiny Gambia was consistently in the top 5 countries in the world in terms of Water-Charity-funded Peace Corps projects in process.  

Fast forward to five years ago, when several of our donors banded together to fund the building of a much-needed senior secondary school in Fula Bantang. Funds were tight, and the school needed a well. I contacted Water Charity and although we were not part of Peace Corps, they agreed to fund half the cost of the well. Over the next several years, GambiaRising worked with several villages around Fula Bantang that are too far from Fula Bantang for their youngest children to walk to the school there (and whose children were therefore not going to school).  We supplied the materials and the villagers built themselves small mud-brick schools. In two of these, we asked Water Charity to partner with us, and they funded toilets, well repair, even kitchens and school gardens for the new schools in Njie Kunda and Korop. It was a great partnership.

Then in 2018 I got a call from Water Charity's Averill Strasser: "I want you to think audaciously," he said. Averill explained that they had had a good year in raising funds, and there weren't enough good Peace Corps projects to keep up. Would we be willing to do some water projects in The Gambia?  I didn't know what to say. We had decided to stay focused on education. But before replying, I consulted with our Upcountry Coordinator Kebba Sanyang. And Kebba's response couldn't have been clearer: "Don't you dare turn them down. There are terrible problems here with water." BUT, I said, I don't have time to administer a more complex program, and I am not willing to risk diminishing our core mission of educating young Gambians. That was when my stepdaughter Emily Lundberg stepped forward and said "Let me help." Having recently completed her PhD under Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia, Emily was looking for something meaty enough to match her abilities, and had already been volunteering with GambiaRising. Then our friend David Levine at West Africa Medicine and Education (WAME) proposed that his right-hand man Ebrima Marong would be an excellent on-the-ground Program Manager. In short order, a separate organization came into being; Water Charity Gambia had two highly capable staff members and in 2019, Water Charity funded more than $100,000 in water projects in The Gambia. Two-thirds of those were in FulaBantang ward, where they worked with GambiaRising's Rafael Jawo and Kebba Sanyang to fix or replace the wells in every one of the ward's 35 villages and schools.

I got to join Emily and Ebrima on a follow-up survey shortly thereafter.

Water Charity wired the funds, and work began. And soon, the broken or contaminated wells in all 35 villages will have been repaired or replaced. Because these villages are all in the "catchment" area of St. Therese's in Fula Bantang, we kept running into GambiaRising students (or former students) on our visits to them. Ismaila Sey, the young man in the black-and-white striped shirt (above) showing Emily and Ebrima the contaminated well in his home village of Sinchu Sambuldu, had been a scholarship student at St. Therese's, had gone on to study at Gambia College with our support and had become a teacher.  Their well was badly contaminated; it could not be closed and needed to be replaced. Water Charity could do that.

Water Charity's work has since expanded greatly in The Gambia. Working with the Department of Rural Water, they have now literally surveyed every village in the entire country, and are taking the Fula Bantang program national, as funding allows.  You can read more about their ambitious plans here:   https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4e750ebf5bef48c59d5126a83fc92844. 

Meanwhile, another opportunity was presenting itself.

Last summer at the National Peace Corps Association's national conference in Austin, Texas I met John O'Leary, the founder of Trees for the Future.  Comparing notes with Emily after the conference, she pointed out that a key reason that wells fall into disrepair in rural villages was the lack of sufficient income in those villages to fund their Water Committees. Could TFF help change that?  I asked my friend Momodou Bah ("Bah2") at Peace Corps about their program; he told me it was excellent and that he had attended their training in Cameroon. I asked O'Leary why, since they were based in Senegal (where he had been a PCV), they had never done a program in The Gambia. "Our team doesn't speak English," he replied, "so we concentrate on French-speaking west Africa."  "OK," I replied. "But neither do most Gambian farmers. But do your trainers speak Pulaar?  Mandinka? Wolof?" "Yes, they do," affirmed John, who then introduced me to TFF's Director of Programs Brandy Lellou. Things moved quickly from there. Last September, a team of TFF trainers from Senegal arrived at St. Therese's School in Fula Bantang, where 30 farmers (half of them women) from Fula Bantang ward spent a week in Trees for the Future's first Gambian Forest Garden Training of Trainers. 

I even got to greet the group before graduation.  I asked, "Can you plant so many trees that in five years I will be able to see Fula Bantang ward just from a satellite photo?" "Of course!" they replied.

The Trees for the Future team was so enthusiastic about the combination of dynamic leadership, a beautiful training facility, and motivated farmers, that they soon thereafter authorized funding for a 4-year Forest Garden program in Fula Bantang ward.  This program, which combines so many concepts familiar to Peace Corps volunteers: live fencing, permagardening, with an integration of "forests" of fruit- and nut-bearing trees, trees for firewood, trees for building, trees for nutrition (such as moringa). TFF funded stipends for four team members to manage the program (Kebba, Raphael, Ismaila Sey from Sinchu Sambuldu, and  and the garden master from Njie Kunda School),  and the 30 local farmers and Mother's Club Presidents who were trained in September are providing local leadership. The goal is to plan hundreds of thousands of trees, starting with the 2020 rainy season, and developing them into year-round, multi-crop organic "permagarden" farms over the 4-year period of the program.  [You can read more about the wonderful TFF program here: https://trees.org/approach/  (They haven't put The Gambia on their map yet, but they will when they have some results to talk about !)]

* * * * *

You can see that the common thread through all this is that we have a reputation for getting things done, and we have a motivated and highly-capable team in place throughout the country that can help other initiatives get traction.  And while GambiaRising has maintained our laser focus on education, we have enabled other complementary, focused organizations to work with us.  

In Fula Bantang ward we expect to demonstrate that the combination of education for everyone, clean water for everyone, enhanced income, and an enhanced environment can reinforce each other to produce a self-sustaining better way of life. GambiaRising's focus has long been girls, but when water is a problem, it is the girls and women who walk to the next village to fetch it. So when Water Charity Gambia fixes a well, they ask the village to commit to sending their girls to school. And they require that women be a substantial portion of the Water Committee. When Trees for the Future works to enhance incomes through funding Forest Gardens, they ask villagers to pledge some of the income to fully funding the village Water Committee to keep the pump in good condition. And at every one of the five schools we have helped get built in the area, the school garden is a demonstration site for improved agriculture techniques, and now for the Trees for the Future Forest Garden program. 

The village of Sinchu Sambuldu is next door to Njie Kunda, where in three phases a four-room school has been built. This January, we dropped by the school. Of the 198 students now enrolled, 115 are girls. Garden master Sainy Jassy (now also a TFF team member) has led the creation of a magnificent school garden and the mothers were out in force to tend to it:

I saw a man hard at work building a new cement-block building. "Kebba, did they ask for help with this new building?" I asked. "They did not; they are doing it on their own," he replied. We walked over to greet the man working on the wall. When we walked away, I asked "Was that a teacher or a parent working so hard?" "It is the local imam," I was told. "He is also a masoner."

Then we headed to the next village, Sinchu Sambuldu.  Ismaila Sey was waiting there to greet us. Ismaila is also working with Trees for the Future and wanted us to see the new women's garden that they had started after the TFF training in September. I try to come unannounced on these visits, to avoid formalities and "staging".  So when we walked out to the garden, I knew we had walked in on something purely spontaneous. And it was a scene I will never forget. The women were chatting, measuring plots, chatting, digging, planting ,...working. I hope these short video clips will give you a sense of it:

We also got to see Sinchu Sambuldu's brand-new well.

I asked Ebrima to ask the women at the well if now that they had good water and a hand pump, would they make sure all their girls went to school.  "Of course," one of the women replied. "There is a new school in Njie Kunda so it is easy now."

It's working.  Each of these programs stands on its own feet, with independent funding. And GambiaRising continues its focused mission to help give as many young Gambians as we can a chance to go to school. And who can doubt that those young people will come out of school ready to do their part to help Gambia rise?

Thank you to everyone who has donated this year to help us help these young people. If you have not yet done so this year, please join us.

Mike McConnell
Managing Trustee
GambiaRising
www.gambiarising.org
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