Dioulde Diery: Where Women Take the Lead!

Located on the road between Boghé and Kaedi, Dioulde Diery attracts the attention of its visitors by the sense of organisation one feels all around the village. The very nice and clean market looks busy though it’s one day before the Tabaski* feast and women usually are very busy preparing for the feast. However, women of Dioulde Diery work on a daily basis on improving the conditions in which their families and children live.

Located on the road between Boghé and Kaedi, Dioulde Diery attracts the attention of its visitors by the sense of organisation one feels all around the village.

“As it was 10am, all the inhabitants would have been in the market of the village,” says Abdelkarim Sy, our guide and a community volunteer in the village.

The very nice and clean market looks busy, though it’s one day before the Tabaski* feast, and women usually are very busy preparing for the feast. However, the women of Dioulde Diery work on a daily basis on improving the conditions in which their families and children live.

The village has two gardens: one in the village and one on the Senegal River, which is about two kilometres away. Women of Dioulde Diery work in the two gardens to feed their families and sell their products in the near villages and towns. The women divide their work in groups in the two gardens, and each group has a leader. 

Hawa Mekka Mbaye, 60, is the leader of the group responsible for watering the gardens. She says that her responsibility is to assure the plants are getting enough water on a daily basis.

“In the past we had to carry water on our heads to water the plants; however, World Vision provided with a water pump that could bring water to the plants,” she says. “World Vision has been also providing us with seeds, fences and fuel for our water pump, as well training on technical aspects of agriculture.”

Hawa supervises a group of 40 women in the village who have the responsibility of managing water in the gardens.

Another group of Dioulde Diery women work on a mill provided by World Vision in the village. Mariem Tall, 38, works in the group in charge of the mill. She explains that they work every second day to crush all types of cereals they produce in the gardens.

Mariem explained how the existence of the mill in their village gives time to her girl to study: “My girl had to either go to Bababé, about 5 kilometres away, to get crushed cereals or help me in crushing cereals at home. Now, she exploits this time to study and do her homework since I can get this crushed cereal in our village thanks to the mill”.

Another sign of their ingenuity is that they put in place a system of dividing the benefit they get from the mill in a very strategic way, bearing in mind that these women live in a rural area where they are not to be highly educated.

World Vision has been conducting a lot of development projects in Dioulde Diery via the Bababé Area Development Programme, including a community development centre, a nutrition project called Nutrition+, and surrounding wall for school.

*Tabaski is the second of two religious holidays celebrated by Muslims worldwide each year. It honours the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his young first-born son Ishmael (Ismail) as an act of submission to God's command and his son's acceptance to being sacrificed, before God intervened to provide Abraham with a ram to sacrifice instead.