Opening New Routes to Community-Led Development in Northern Guinea

It’s not much to look at - at first glance. It doesn’t photograph well from any angle. A workmanlike fusion of girders, tie rods and gravel wrapped in a concrete mold, the bridge over the Kouregnaki River in the far northern reaches of Guinea’s Fouta Djallon Mountains is a streamlined study in architectural understatement, a modest monument to utility that joins two rocky stretches of road at a quiet rural juncture 30 kilometers south of the Senegal border.

But Ibrahim Sory Souaré, 64, sees the bridge from a different perspective – a point of view shaped by a lifetime spent tilling the soils of Guinea’s remote Lansa and Badiar regions – and his assessment of the Kouregnaki span suggests that there is more to the structure than meets the eye.

“Ce pont est la vie,” Souaré says. “That bridge is life.”

When he was a younger man, Souaré worked for the Government of Guinea as an agricultural extension officer. From 1962 through the 1980s, he helped transform food production in Lansa and Badiar by teaching farming families how to diversify their cultivation of fonio and other millets with a mixture of potatoes, maize, beans, peppers, and tomatoes. The new crops dramatically improved food yields and enhanced diet balance. And the introduction of potatoes, which kept well in storage and could be transported over long distances, gave the region’s farmers something they had never had: a cash crop that they could sell in bulk to distant consumers.

But a major obstacle blocked the farmers of Lansa and Badiar from tapping the income-generating potential of their new harvest. What they needed was a hungry urban market that would buy their surplus at a good price, and that market, the bustling town of Kédougou in neighboring Senegal – a major point of sale to cities stretching all the way to Dakar – was located just 80 kilometers to the north. Yet Kédougou also stood on the wrong side of a river that had no bridge, and the only viable route to Senegal was a rough mountain bypass that meandered 250 kilometers to the south and east before crossing the border. At that distance, transport costs were prohibitive, and hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs were effectively cut off from economic opportunity.

This situation changed in 2001 when representatives of the Center for Development Support (CAD), ADF’s Guinea partner organization, approached local community leaders with a proposal to help them identify and address their most critical social infrastructure needs. ADF and CAD had recently helped the Government of Guinea and the World Bank create an effective participatory development model for Guinea’s new Village Support Program (PACV), and the Foundation had agreed to expand its role as a facilitator of rural infrastructure development by entering into a participating agency service agreement (PASA) with the United States Agency for International Development in Guinea (USAID-Guinea).

The agreement proposed to target US $1.25 million in funding provided by ADF ($750,000) and USAID-Guinea ($500,000) to a new series of projects in two designated “pockets of poverty’ – remote rural areas with limited resource access. Surveys conducted by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) had identified 12 areas of Guinea that had not benefited from either government or donor intervention, and the PASA was directed toward enhancing Guinea’s efforts to decentralize its economic development programs, enhance local capacity-building initiatives, and provide demand-driven infrastructure where it was most needed.

Based on their experiences in implementing other participatory development projects in Guinea (see “A School for Development in Bady” in this issue), CAD’s staff fully expected that the “pocket of poverty” program in Lansa and Badiar would take some time to get off the ground. The process of creating effective community forums where different groups could openly debate local development needs had required careful negotiations with local leaders and multiple meetings with diverse constituencies. Moreover, CAD’s program directors knew that local communities were divided by a history of ethnic tensions between Foulah, Bassari, and Djankanké villages. This situation had generated serious concerns about the viability of a participatory development approach in Fouta Djallon.

Mamadi Kourouma and Fode Keita of CAD were thus surprised to find that consensus, not conflict, greeted them when they arrived to explain the goals of the project. Men and women; children and elders; Foulahs, Bassaris and Djankankés all agreed that the first order of business for their new project was to build a bridge to Kédougou.

Local leaders put aside their differences to get the project moving as quickly as possible. One elderly Foulah chief stood before a mixed meeting of Foulah and Bassari residents and noted that the assembly marked the first time in his lifetime that the groups had come together. He then asked the residents of his village to “to join hands [with Bassaris] in an effort to develop our community.” At another meeting, two villages whose members had shunned contact with one another following a tragic murder agreed to work together to collect sand and gravel for the new span.

The weeks that followed ADF’s approval of bridge construction plan were filled with activity as people worked long days to put a new bridge in place before the next harvest. A civil engineer was hired to design the span, and local residents provided the bulk of the labor required to complete construction of a structure whose final cost was less than US $60,000.

Today, local residents near the bridge have grown accustomed to watching the daily express to Kédougou, laden with people and produce, rumble out of the hills and across the Kouregnaki bridge. The transports return in the evenings with essential goods purchased in Senegal and sellers whose pockets are lined with cash. Ibrahim Sory Souaré has embarked on a second career as the head of a thriving potato growers’ cooperative whose 700 members sell 60 percent of their produce to Senegalese buyers. Individual farmers now earn enough income to send their children to school, and local entrepreneurs are investing in small businesses that have transformed the upland villages of Lebekerin, Touba, and Madina Wora into vibrant local market centers. 

The success of the “pocket of poverty” project in Lansa and Badiar has helped confirm one of the ADF’s guiding principles: that African communities are filled with local development experts who know what their greatest needs are, and, if given the opportunity to take a central role in decision-making, will invest their own time, creativity and energy in efforts to build a stronger future for themselves and their families. The Lansa and Badiar program has also shown that a participatory development approach is often the most direct and cost-effective way to implement projects that address real and immediate needs.

Over the past three years, the success of the bridge-building project has carried over into the construction of new schools, rural health centers, and clean wells through cooperative efforts undertaken by neighbors who have chosen to embrace the opportunities of the present over differences of the past. And by facilitating close cooperation among communities across Lansa and Badiar, CAD and ADF have helped create broad-based institutions for participatory development that have the power to bridge old divides and provide a dynamic framework for sustainable growth at the local level.