By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Women in Samu village, Kambia district say ActionAid Sierra Leone has empowered them by providing for them a seed bank and rice mill, among other interventions.
The Chairlady of a group of 45 women, Aminata Kamara told Politico on Friday that the social justice and humanitarian organization had worked extensively for them and in the rest of the northern region and some other parts of the country for over 30 years. Kambia was one of the first places the NGO started working in Sierra Leone.
“We have a seed bank here that provides for us. We take from it, farm and use the money to pay fees and medical bills for our children. We feel empowered,” Aminata said.
The construction of the seed bank and rice mill was worth Le 72 million and was completed in 2016. It is one of the many intervention areas the NGO has embarked on in the district, and is one of the campaigns for women to do less domestic work.
Aminata said a bag of rice could take almost half a day to be properly pounded manually but that they were now doing much more with a rice mill.
“On average this machine can process up to 20 bags of rice for us daily,” she said.
The seed bank project which started with 25 women, today has up to 45 women on the scheme.
Duramani Kamara, AAISL Programme Officer in Kambia told Politico that the project had not only empowered the women but had also saved them a lot of labor time.
“With the rice mill they have saved a lot of time [because] before now if you came to this village all their hands were swollen from holding the pestle and pounding rice,” Kamara said.
But Action Aid support in this village is not just limited to this. Kamara said they encouraged the women to go into livestock rearing. Children in the village have also been supported to go to school, by providing them with uniforms and learning materials.
In a public meeting in Kapairoh, a teacher from the Movement of Faith School told members of the ActionAid General Assembly who were on a visit to the area as part of their Annual General meeting that the organization had provided in-service training for him. He said this had contributed to better learning outcomes for the children he was teaching.
“Action Aid has helped us to know how to write lesson notes. Before now we did not know how to write that. But today we can, and we go to the classroom better prepared,” Yusuf Sesay said.
“The kids are being taught better now,” he added
The General Assembly members were all in the district from Friday throughout the weekend, evaluating their programs and discussing new ways forward. They visited their areas of operations to asses at firsthand how much impact their interventions had had on the people.
The Board and Assembly Chairman, Umaru Fofana said “ this visit is part of our accountability mechanism, to know what we have done here that is right and for you to tell us what we can do to improve our work in your community.”
He was addressing groups of people in Kapairoh in Magbema chiefdom and Bennah in Masungbala chiefdom in the Kambia District.
Despite the support to these communities, residents appealed to ActionAid that they needed more and continued help.
In Masimera village, Action Aid constructed a four-classroom block for the Kambia District Education Council Primary School.
Lamin Kamara, a teacher at the school said enrollment figures had drastically increased and that they could no longer accommodate all the kids in the coming years.
“Before now we were using makeshift structures as classrooms for some of the children. Thank God today we have proper classrooms. But as I speak to you now enrollment has increased drastically.”
He said they needed support “to get another building or we will not be able to handle the population in the coming years”.
He went on to say that the school had close to 600 pupils scattered across six classrooms in total.
Teachers in the school, say they want to go for further studies and get better teacher training, something ActionAid said they were looking into. The local ActionAid manager said they had in fact already started training the teachers. “During holidays we bring them to Kambia town for some courses where they spend some time learning till the holidays are over. It’s a three-year program and we support them right through”, the official said.
© 2019 Politico Online
