Environmental Issues
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.

Our Response
In response to the farmers' plight, TREES’ Technician John Leary, began training communities in soil conservation techniques, agroforestry, forestry, fruit tree propagation, and has helped establish four 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 vegetable production. John worked with these families for over three years, coordinating trainings with Peace Corps Volunteers, and our program is continuing to expand.

This project is an intensive program delivering on-site training and planning to eighty families families in twenty 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.

Program Update January 2009
Omar has a hard time slowing down. He is one of the hardest working members of the Trees for the Future team. In 2008, traveling primarily on the back of a donkey-driven cart driven, he reached communities throughout the Department of Kaffrine and assisted over 200 farmers in 17 villages plant over 650,000 trees in 2008. A large part of his work on the ground is done in collaboration with Senegal Peace Corps volunteers.

This year as well Omar put the Trees for the Future training center into full action. On a daily basis, many farmers visit the center and demonstration site next door. Omar is quick to share his knowledge and experiences in agroforestry to whomever will listen. Throughout the year he has also held a number of trainings in agroforestry for local women and farmers and has assisted in the training of Peace Corps volunteers. While Omar is out in the field or conducting trainings his assistant, Abdoul, spends his days maintaining the demonstration forest garden.

Working with the local people he is teaching and encouraging them to plant many trees as live fences and windbreaks. He uses multi-purpose, fast growing species such as Prosipis juliflora and Bauhinia rufenscens, which establish thorny walls to keep the goats out and provide a sustainable source of firewood. Farmers are also planting a lot of Jatropha curcas as live fencing, whose seeds will be used to support the growing biofuel industry in Senegal and perhaps around the world. Leucanea leucocephala is being planted as windbreaks and as alleycropping to improve soil fertility. In addition, the farmers are beginning to use the Leucaena leaves to feed their livestock. Amusingly, to promote its use as fodder, Omar is referring to the tree as “Garab u yap”, Wolof for “tree of meat.” In addition to his work with farmers, Omar also provided technical assistance and seeds to Kaffrine’s and Nganda’s Eaux et Fôret offices and local NGOs to assist their own tree planting activities.

In April 2008, Africa Program Coordinator, Ethan Budiansky, headed back to Senegal to evaluate Omar’s efforts. Together, and with local Peace Corps volunteers, they traveled to a number of communities and farmers’ fields participating in TREES’ program. Ethan met with the farmers, checked out their tree plantings, and discussed their current experiences and possible improvements for the upcoming year. In all, he was really impressed with their motivation, hard work and the outcomes of the Senegal program.

While in Senegal Ethan helped Omar expand the Trees for the Future program to Kedougou, on the Southeastern border, where Ethan served as a Peace Corps volunteer himself. Local technician, Karamba Diakhaby, with the help of Peace Corps volunteers is reaching local farmers in the region. He is also developing a Forest Garden demonstration site in his field along a main path by the Gambia River. Every day many farmers travel past his field heading to and from the town. Similar to the way our work developed in Kaffrine, the demonstration site will attract people to learn more about agroforestry and to partner with Trees for the Future.