Resilience in West African frontier communities: southern Senegal, western Mali and eastern Guinea

1. Resilience
in West African Frontier Communities
Southern Senegal, Western Mali
and Eastern Guinea
16 months
Challenges:
• Damaro (Guinea), Agnack (Senegal), Bouillagui (Mali) and Mon-
zona (Mali) have developed their own longstanding adaptive and
resilience strategies over the last 100 years.
• How can we make those solutions known beyond the local scale?
• How can we make these communities acknowledged as knowledge
producers and development makers in their own rights?
Methodology:
• Training workshops for villagers
• data collect through mobile phones
• dissemination through mobile app and website
What have you found?
New technologies are central to empower marginalized commu-
nities and help them to take their development challenges
in their own hands by making them confident enough to fur-
ther preserve their local knowledge and make it known beyond
their communities.
Who are the intended audiences for this research?
• Other villages in similar situation
• local government
• NGOs
• schoolchildren
Has the research already contributed to change?
• Villagers now confident in using new tech-
nologies to preserve and disseminate local
knowledge.
• Local historical knowledge now being used
in the classroom with schoolchildren
• Media training and participation in radio
and TV programmes have reinforced villagers’
self-confidence.
• Overall, communities increasingly more
self-confident in their ability to tackle devel-
opment challenges.