senegal flag Our Work In Senegal
Population: 10,852,147
Our Project:

Building on a project initiated and nurtured by two Peace Corps volunteers, TREES is training farmers throughout the Kaolack Region in agroforestry, fruit tree production, and vegetable production. After many years of working in the area, we opened an agroforestry training center in April 2007.

Situation: Confronting the Sahara desert, which lies 150 miles to the north and is moving steadily to the south, the farmers of Kaffrine face a rapidly growing environmental disaster.
 
Click here or scroll to the bottom of the page to view pictures from our work in Senegal.
   
   
map The Wolof people in the Department of Kaffrine, live in the peanut basin of Senegal. They have punished their soils with over a century of farming peanuts and millet, and they are looking for new ideas to deal with irregular rainfall, locust attacks, and the encroaching Sahara desert.

The few remaining baobab, tamarind, and bush mangoes are all that remain of a once thriving forest. Even native Acacia species are failing to naturally regenerate. The last of the adult indigenous fruit trees are slowly dying. The Senegalese government predicts that once plentiful trees such as Cordyla africana, the bush mango, will soon be endangered.
 
Access to running water in many communities in recent years has allowed for dry season vegetable production, which is becoming a primary source of income, but this work continues to lack vital aspects of sustainable land use.
 
Khady is the head of her youth group
This Prosopis living fence and windbreak drops large
amounts of organic matter into this garden every year
 
In response to the farmers plight, TREES’ Technician John Leary, began training communities in soil conservation techniques, agroforestry, forestry, fruit tree propagation, and he helped establish four (4) agroforestry demonstration sites.
 
Families in Kaffrine are seeing our systems approach, and how it can revolutionize the way they farm, collect firewood, manage their soil, feed their animals, and sustainably expand their lucrative vegetable production. John worked with these families for over three years, coordinating trainings with Peace Corps Volunteers. He has been returning regularly to provide training and support.
 
John giving a training on multipurpose windbreaks
 
This project is an intensive program delivering on-site training and planning to eighty (90) families families in twenty (20) communities as they establish agroforestry technologies in and around gardens and crop fields. This project emphasizes a very strong training content and has planted over 750,000 trees. We have been able to bring together the efforts of local NGOs, Peace Corps, and the Senegalese Ministries of Agriculture and Forestry, all of whom are currently using our training sites.
 
Our Field Representative, Omar Ndao, has played an integral role in this grassroots campaign to institute sustainable land management, and he is well known in the surrounding area for his innovative techniques. His land lies at a major crossroads, and it is here that we have built a regional training center, which was opened in 2007.
 
Those desiring copies of training videos in Wolof should contact us.
 

John and Babou

Omar
John Leary, Omar Ndao, and Babou Ndao
Program Coordinators
   

The Grand Opening of the Trees for the Future Training Center
Villiage Planting Day
 
 
 
Trees for the Future | P.O. Box 7027 | Silver Spring, MD 20907 | 1.800.643.0001 or 1.301.565.0630 | LINK PARTNERS