The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a US$19 million grant to a poverty reduction and women's empowerment project supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and designed to boost the productivity and income of women farmers using low-cost, mechanized power.
The four-year grant will help establish 600 new sustainable, rural agro-enterprises in the West African countries of Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. The center piece of the project is the multifunctional platform (MFP), a diesel-run engine mounted on a chassis to which a variety of processing equipment can be attached, including cereal mill, husker, battery charger, and joinery and carpentry equipment. At least 24 of these MFPs will be biofuel-based.
Compared to developed countries where household chores can happen at the flick of a switch, in rural homes across Africa with no connection to the electricity grid (and where none is planned), preparing a meal is a laborious task for women. They spend up to six hours a day collecting firewood, fetching water, husking and pounding grain, with no time left for outside employment. Girls often perform poorly in school due to inconsistent attendance and find themselves forced to drop out to help their mothers.
The multi-functional platform takes domestic tasks like milling and husking sorghum, millet, maize and other grains, normally done with a mortar and pestle or a grinding stone, and mechanises them, making them profitable economic activities. The platform can also generate electricity for lighting, refrigeration and to pump water, which helps provide clean water to communities along with improved health care and education services.
Announcing the initiative in Dakar, Senegal, UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis explained that due to lack of access to modern energy services, women are stuck in a vicious cycle of illiteracy, ill health and poverty from one generation to the next. 'By investing in this simple power source for rural communities, women no longer need to spend all their time grinding grains or pumping water. They have more hours in the day to develop profitable activities that could boost their productivity, enabling them to sell better quality products and increase their income using low-cost, effective technology,' he said. As part of the enterprise projects, UNDP and its extensive network of local NGOs will back the women's groups with literacy and management training and support.
'This project will employ cost-effective technology to significantly improve the lives of women in West Africa by freeing up time—their scarcest resource—and enabling them to sell higher value products at market more often, thus increasing their income and improving lives,' said Dr. Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural development, Global Development Program at the foundation. 'Through this effort, we hope to learn whether these platforms could reach an even larger number of communities in Africa.'
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Agricultural Development initiative is working with a wide range of partners to provide millions of small farmers in the world's poorest areas with tools and opportunities to boost their productivity, increase their incomes, and build better lives for themselves and their families.
The benefits of the MFP have already been proven in parts of West Africa, where processing shea nuts for its butter is a common economic activity. In Mali, for example, crushing 10 kilograms of shea nuts manually yields 3.5 kilograms of butter in eight hours in comparison to 4.5 kilograms in four and half hours using the platform.
In Senegal, Mrs S. Sakho of Batantinty, explains that before the platform was introduced in her village she rarely earned more than 25000 CFA (US$55) from processing and selling shea butter. 'With the platform I easily earn 100,000 CFA (US$220) at the end of the harvest. The yield is high because the time is there. The platform has improved my life. I spend the earnings for the children's education and clothing; I no longer look like a peasant,' she said.
The initiative is also expected to contribute to the objectives of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional energy access policy to meet the Millennium Development Goals, which was adopted in January 2006 with the aim of providing rural and peri-urban populations with energy services including mechanical power for agro-processing. It is hoped that the lessons learned from this initiative will serve as the basis to expand the approach across Sub Saharan Africa, where an estimated 100 million people in rural areas could benefit.
