NOVEMBER 2010: Don't forget South East!
SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL’s food security, water, sanitation and hygiene assessment in Maryland and Grand Kru
Our humanitarian action
Water and sanitation
Improving access to water and sanitation and supporting
public health activities
Our water and sanitation access program in south east
Liberia (Maryland and Grand Kru Counties) is part of a global Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
project initiated by DFID and set up by a consortium
of NGOs including OXFAM, Action Contre la Faim, Concern Worldwide,
Tearfund and SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL. The consortium's five years strategy is
aimed to support the Liberian government and the Ministry of
Health in their development objectives: access to drinking water
and sanitation and hygiene awareness.
The funding for SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL program is currently provided by the European Commission (ECHO).
Location: Maryland and Grand Kru counties.
Direct aid recipients: 9 170 people
- Access to drinking water:
building and rehabiliting 11 wells, training communities to water sources management and monitoring.
- Access to sanitation: construction and rehabilitation of 24 institutional latrines in 6 schools, support 10 communities to build their own latrines using CLTS approach.
- Raising
hygiene awareness in cooperation with communities and local teams:
training volunteers to health and hygiene in 35 communities, transmission of message awareness about hygiene practices and maintenance training in 11 schools, distribution of garbage and jerry cans in 11 schools, workshops to raise awareness about hygiene, latrine usage and water management, participation to the Global Hand Washing day, the World Water day, the World Toilet Day...
- Strengthening local skills: building the capacities of our local partner, SHODAR, workshops technical
trainings in water, sanitation and hygiene activities implementation, computer and software use,
accounting, logistics, project management and training to improve the capacity of local stakeholders.
- Infrastructure maintenance: creation and training
of water management committees, training pump technicians, support
and coordination with other NGOs for pump maintenance.
FOCUS: Global Handwashing Day (October
15, 2009)
The 15th of October is Global Hand Washing Day. SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL
took this opportunity to organize a big event in Harper, the
capital of Maryland County where SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL has
one of its offices.
 The
aim of this day was to sensitize the population particularly
the children on the importance and impact of hands washing
with the following key message: “Support Global
Hand Washing Day! Washing hands with soap and water keeps
you healthy!”
A various range of activities has been organized during the
whole day:
- A distribution of special T-Shirts for the day was organized
- A parade through the main streets of Harper City was
carried out with Harper Big Town Band.
- Dramatization of hands washing with dance, music and actions
was performed by the Maryland culture troop in several places
of Harper
- Demonstration of proper hand washing with distribution
of soap and followed by the distribution of biscuits to
children, to show that when your hands are clean you can
safely eat!
 The
participation in these activities was very important, among
the participants 10 schools sent each of them at least 10
students and 1 teacher to represent them. Read
an interview with one of these students- The activity was fully coordinated with the local authorities
and the most important ones participated to this event:
a Representative of the Superintendant, the Harper City
Corporation, the Maryland County Health Team, the Ministry
of Education.
- Moreover SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL program manager assistant
was interviewed by several radios and newspapers who then
spread the message of the importance of washing hands
This day was very unique and successful, and so far
hands washing remains the talk of the town!
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Food security
Fourteen years of civil war have devastated the few existing infrastructures
and nearly dismantled the societal structure. Agricultural production
after the war was at its lowest, able to fulfill only a small part
of the populations’ needs.
In January 2006, SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL initiated a strategy to support agricultural
revival in the Bong district. This strategy was made of 3 programmes, we are now implementing the third one.
Strengthenning food security
This programme is currently financed by EuropeAid and the French Agency for Development (AFD)
Location: Bong county.
Number of direct aid recipients: 1 000 households
- Empower a network of agriculture sector actors and local authorities able to design, implement, monitor and capitalize on sustainable projects: Organization of workshops and trainings organization management, leadership for 10 Farmer Based Organizations and in entrepreneurship for 50 Master Producers, build the capacity and support the activities of 4 local Non Governmental Organizations.
- Implementation of 25 pilot projects demonstrating sustainable agriculture development: The 25 projects are cases studies and demonstration of best practices focusing in 5 key areas with innovative approaches which are: Farming focusing on the integration of new sustainable agriculture practices into the current traditional farm system, Integrated swamps development farming, Urban agriculture, Farming focusing on animals breeding and Agriculture infrastructure or processing facilities such as storages, drying floors, rice mills, slaughter houses, etc. These projects involve all stakeholders and allow efficient capacity building of all the actors. The farmers learn on best practices/techniques, and the involved authorities develop their skill on managing community project. In addition, such examples could be replicated by the community and the facilities or infrastructures will be assets launching agriculture development in the area.
- Set up of a Consortium of NGOs monitoring both agriculture development and food security situation and share key findings with the actors of agriculture development at both County and Country level: Sharing projects key findings with agriculture actors allow the action’s reproduction in other areas, if pertinent, considering lessons learnt during the proposed program. Sharing data with both decentralized authorities at Country level and the Ministry of Agriculture in Monrovia will facilitate information transmission and experiences sharing which could probably be relevant for the authorities in order to, one more time, get multiplicative program effects in other country area. These inputs and lessons learnt could then possibly play a certain role in the design of adjusted agriculture development policies.
Updated : August 2011 |
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