Did you know 135 million people live in Sahelian Africa without access to clean and safe water? That’s nearly 4 in 10 people the population of the United States. Let that sink in for a moment. Geographically, it’s the semi-arid region of the African continent that lies south of the Sahara desert with hot temperatures and an average rainfall of 16 inches yearly. 

Women in those isolated rural regions spend on average 16 million hours daily walking to fetch water from sources that might carry infectious diseases. Up to 95% of Sahelian farmers are reliant on short seasonal rainfalls for crop irrigation so there is a major need for innovation in agricultural productivity.

Learn more about Green Sahel Farms.

She’s a 52-year-old woman born and raised in a small isolated rural town of 2000 inhabitants in the Sahel country of Burkina Faso (West Africa) where women spend hours daily walking to collect water for their families. When we first spoke with Noelie, she fondly recollected nostalgic memories of a time when steady rainfalls allowed her family to grow abundant corn and fresh legumes on a ½ acre food plot.

She could even pay for her children’s tuition fees with the surplus of crop supplies. Nowadays Noelie and thousands of rural women face a grim reality.

Rising temperatures and shorter seasonal rainfalls mean short supplies of fresh water for human consumption and crop irrigation. And this is the result of extreme weather conditions associated with global warming. She’s spent her entire life savings fighting to overcome the shackles of poverty associated with extreme weather conditions.

The resiliency of those rural farming communities is awe-inspiring. Instead of collecting handouts, those rural women only ask for basic access to hydraulic infrastructures such as water wells, storage tanks, and adequate training on organic farming to grow climate-proof and high-yield crops all year round. Her story is shared by countless women and young men who live in unspeakable daily suffering due to worsening climatic conditions and inadequate responses from a hamstrung government.

Green Sahel Farms (GSF) strives to give rural women like Noelie a fighting chance against the perils of mother nature. We do so by building the leadership capacity of rural communities and empowering them with training resources on sustainable models of crop production that leverage access to water wells to grow climate-proof and high-yield crops all year round.

Our hands-on training focuses on pragmatic training about drip irrigation systems, organic composting, and crop rotation. Noelie is very hopeful that our revolutionary approach to agriculture will help to free her from the shackles of poverty. Rural women like Noelie have trustworthy relationships with Green Sahel Farms due to our proximity to the local communities which allows us to build real human connections with them.

We work with local technical experts in water well drilling, drip irrigation systems, and organic farming to build the leadership capacity of rural communities and empower them with pragmatic training resources on sustainable models of crop production that leverage access to water sources to grow climate-proof and high yield crops such as corn and fresh legumes all year round.

Proceeds from the sale of crop surplus will be incrementally reinvested into building up our current operational capacities. With every water point that you help us fund, we commit to replicating such focused solutions across larger rural communities.

Together we can restore social confidence in sustainable organic farming for rural women and men in Burkina Faso.

And while the global climate crisis is huge, we’re optimistic. We know how to solve the problem, and we make progress every day thanks to the help of local partners and generous supporters.

With your help we can fund these much-needed resources:

• Water Well: Water well is necessary to support our farming operations since the country is characterized by 8 months of dry seasons out of the year.
• Storage Tank: Storage tanks provide for efficient ways to manage water resources and its applications to farm irrigation.

• Solar Panels: to supply sustainable sources of energy to power up the well pumps and thus enable water storage in the tanks.
• Drip Irrigation Systems: prevents diseases by minimizing contact with the leaves and it generates 70% savings in agricultural water consumption.

100% of your donations will fund the acquisition of these resources.

Transparency is one of our core values, so along with using every penny you donate to fund this project, we also prove each project with photos and GPS coordinates