Agriculture in Sare Alpha: Labour work reduces while yield increases

At least 200 hundred kilometres from Basse, the regional capital of Upper River Region (URR), is Sare Alpha.  It is a traditional agrarian village, like many other communities in the region and in The Gambia as a whole.

At the village, the main preoccupation of all is subsistence farming. 

Since the formation of the village, at least 200 years ago, they have been alternatively farming on the same piece of land using the same traditional farming methods and with little modification on the materials used.  The harvest has almost been the same year in, year out.  

But unlike some other traditional communities, the villagers of Sare Alpha are receptive to change, change for the better.  At the first visit of the officials of the Nema project and at the introduction of the concept of Farmer Field School (FFS), the villager jumped at it.

‘Nema’, is a Mandinka word adopted as the name of an International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)-financed project in The Gambia.  The seven-year project is designed to reduce the poverty of rural women and youth with the objective of increasing income by improving rice and vegetable productivities.

Cohesion due to education: Benefits of literacy in URR

By Lamin Jahateh

Sare Alpha and Julangel are two villages in Upper River Region (URR) benefiting from a functional literacy programme being funded by a government project.  The two villages are largely inhabited by two different ethnic groups with distinctive cultures and traditions. 

But one of the similarities of the two cultures and traditions is that women do things on their own, with support from men, and men do things largely independent of women.

This segregation is largely very pronounced and prominent in Julangel, a Sarahule community.  At the village, women do not sit at the bantaba, not for any reason, and men do not go to the market, except in rear circumstances.  But the village market and the bantaba are directly opposite, just the road that divides the village into two almost equal halves also separates the bantaba from the market.