Heifer Senegal Wins USAID Sub-Grant

Heifer International is part of a consortium of four organizations that have won a $40 million grant from USAID to implement the Yajeende Agricultural Development Program in Senegal.

Yaajeende means “abundance,” or “prosperity” in Pular, a Senegalese language. This grant is in response to an RFA which was issued by USAID in May, 2010. Funding for the first year will come from the Global Food Security program, with subsequent funding to come from Feed the Future.

Yaajende, which will begin later this year, will “improve the food and nutrition of 1,000,000 individuals in 100,000 households across 60 regional communities.” The project will establish “a team of 1000 Community Based Service Providers (CBSP) that will provide inputs and agricultural services and nutritional products to rural people.” Through this project, “commodity sales of produced outputs will equal $30 million by year five. It is expected that increased economic activity will improve the household incomes of farmer participants by an average of 250% and reduce the number of underweight children by 35%.”

Other members of the consortium are CLUSA- the Cooperative League of the USA, which is the project lead and will coordinate agricultural development (excluding livestock and irrigation) and business development; Counterpart International, which will coordinate nutrition and gender; Sheladia, a Washington, D.C based contractor which will coordinate infrastructure such as irrigation systems; and Manobi, which will coordinate MIS systems, monitoring and evaluation.

For its part, Heifer will place livestock (poultry, sheep and goats) among 5,500 households and through passing on the gift will reach 19,500 households over five years.

The project will be managed using a one-team approach, as such the budget will be centralized. While the total grant award is almost $40 million, Heifer will directly manage approximately $1.5 million, which excludes expenses for livestock, training and technical services, all of which add up to approximately $3.5 million.

This grant represents an enormous opportunity for Heifer Senegal, which is a three year-old program. It also represents a significant opportunity for Heifer to reach and assist more families out of poverty in Africa.

On June 22, 2011, Moses Nyabila shared a remarkable story of transformation that’s taking place in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda through Heifer’s East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) project. Moses has been the regional director for EADD since 2008, and he spoke to a diverse group of representatives of numerous non-governmental organizations and agencies at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Washington, DC.