Water is getting scarce!

In Niger, as in many other countries of the largely arid Sahell, water is becoming increasingly scarce. The annual rainy season is very intense but it is short – just long enough for farmers to plant their seeds in hope of a harvest. During the rest of the year, the farmers cannot count on any rainfall. Water is very hard to get. It is not at all unusual for a farmer (and more often his wife) to walk 5 or 10 km to fill a couple of buckets. That is all the water the woman will have to do her chores, and she will have to make it last the whole day and be careful not to spill any.

The farmers, who will have sown their fields in early May, await the annual rainy season anxiously. If it comes too late their harvests will suffer. These are subsistence farmers, and what they grow goes essentially to feed their family. When people say the granaries are empty in the run-up to the rainy season, that means the rains had better come soon or families will have nothing left to eat. At that point, they may have to sell off their livestock, probably at a loss, in order to feed themselves until the next harvest is in.

To help find a sustainable solution to this problem, Oxfam Québec has mounted a project at Dosso and Tillabéry, in partnership with Mooriben, a local NGO. The goal is to give farmers access to new irrigation technologies. The "drip" technology can be used to irrigate fields on a regular and permanent basis.
In this way, farmers can diversify their harvests and they can produce vegetable crops throughout the year, thereby improving the nutritional health of young children and pregnant women, who are the main victims of recurrent food crises and malnutrition.

Today, on World Water Day, I am proud to be able to share my experience with you. What I did was just "a drop in the bucket", but it made a real change in the daily lives of the men and women I lived with for two years.