Preparing for trek

This week I have been preparing for an eleven day monitoring trek, which Abdoulie, Alieu and I will set out for on Sunday. 

The purpose of the trek is to monitor two projects - the groundnut project and a youth participation project. 

With the youth participation project, the volunteers have been working with young people to help them access services and programmes available for youths, focusing on how to get them into gainful employment or self-employment. They are running some training camps, and we will visit to see how they are getting on, say a few words at the closing ceremonies, and hear from the young people themselves so that we can begin to evaluate the project. 

For the groundnut project we want to see the results of the farmer field schools that have been running since we held the training of trainers session back in May. We also want to check in with the volunteers and see what they have been working on since the annual partnership reviews - especially as some of them will be leaving in a few weeks time. 

And in an interesting twist we will also be visiting weather stations and capturing data about rain fall and crop viability. As I have mentioned, we really haven't had much rain this rainy season, and people are starting to worry. A taxi driver told me that they were doing rain dances in Serrakunda the other week! The low rain could have a really major impact on groundnut and rice harvests this year, amongst other things, which means that there will be food shortages when we move into the dry period. A low crop yield will mean that Gambia will have to rely even more on imported goods, and living costs will spike. So, while we hope for rain we will also have a look at how much rain we have had, how much we had last year, and try and get some data for the final project evaluation. 

The positive part is that because we haven't just focused on agricultural techniques, but have given skills training, such as business management and governance training, the project should still have benefits for the participants even if rainfall affects this years' harvest.