In Senegal, le quality of rural life has largely declined, due to the drastic agricultural crisis. Agirculture is the primary economic force of the population. This crisis also affects urban life due to the arrival of massive quantities of youth, uneducated or poorly educated, looking for better opportunities in the big city, where they find themselves on the brink of poverty and socially exiled.
In response to this double challenge of supporting a peasant agriculture more and more at risk, and the support of other economic sectors allowing a diversification of rural opportunities and so countering the exodus, since 1993 the Méckhé peasants’ groups union (UGPM), has created several actions in three rural communities around Méckhé, situated in the agricultural region of Thiès, on the West coast.
UGPM sustains more than 5000 families and intervenes in diverse areas to reduce the solder blight [1] which weighs heavily on food security and increases family debt. As such, UGPM intervenes not only to improve quantitative production, but also to diversify and to push the value of local resources (such as established cereal varieties), develop processing technologies (increasing the value of produce) and improve marketing. Objective: a peasant agriculture that is economically feasible and officially recognized.
Aware of the need to diversify employment opportunities in rural areas and concerned by the low levels of education and exodus of young people, UGPM has also decided to work in priority on the training and reinsertion of youth between 15 and 30 years of age. With literacy programs, practical training on production activities, restructuring and turning to profit rural trades, UGPM hopes to offer these young people more attractive options for life and work in their native villages.
Birth of a Partnership
Our partnership with UGPM started in 2000 with support of the training and social reintegration of area youth.
Activities led together
Discover our project conducted between 2002 and 2004: 2003 - Senegal, training as a means of social and economic reinsertion of young people
