Vivre Avec L'eau | Live With Water - Senegal

Vivre Avec L'eau | Live With Water is helping informal settlements in Greater Dakar, Senegal, adapt to flooding incidents through community collaboration and implementing potential solutions.

Fast facts:

This activity has helped implement infrastructure solutions like manual water pumps, a cost-effective technology that can be repaired and maintained with local knowledge;
The project developed a solution that will install traffic barriers made from recycled waste that will not only cause vehicles to slow down, but also create spaces for urban gardening.

The problem

Medina Fass Mbao and Bene Baraque are two communities in informal settlements in Greater Dakar in which poor and vulnerable households are subjected to annual flooding which causes serious damage to health, property and income, as well as affecting social structures and schooling.

The solution

The community in Medina Fass Mbao formed a flood committee and invited Vivre Avec L'eau to visit and help analyse the community’s needs and drive potential solutions. Following this collaborative analysis, the “Museke model” was adapted together with local government, national and international experts and communities from Medina Fass Mbao and Bene Baraque. The model focuses on low-cost and low-tech solutions adapted to the needs of the affected communities. This activity has helped implement infrastructure solutions like manual water pumps, a cost-effective technology that can be repaired and maintained with local knowledge. An urban gardening component was developed in close collaboration with the local market gardeners. Market vendors operating along the street became concerned about losing business due to construction activities. In response to these concerns, the project developed a technical solution that allowed floodwaters to recede without expanding the street and the destruction of the market.

Helping the planet

Together with the community, the project developed a solution that will install traffic barriers made from recycled waste that will not only cause vehicles to slow down, but also create spaces for urban gardening. The entire community, including youths and children were strongly involved in “Action Days” to help clean up the community and construct urban gardening plots around the local lake.

Helping people

During implementation, the project ensured that as many activities as possible were carried out by residents, to generate local income and to raise awareness and engage in capacity-building. The infrastructure was constructed using local entrepreneurs and a local workforce, including training on how to maintain the infrastructure in the future.

Scaling Up

Through the strong participation of children and young people the project is helping to build awareness of resilience strategies and promote behavioural change that will sustain the project’s impact into the future. Involving communities at both the design stage and intensively throughout implementation builds community ownership of project components, meaning that residents feel responsible for newly created urban spaces and undertakes their upkeep.