Building a drought-proof community – A case of a small town in Somalia

Dangoroyo town is busy – people cleaning the streets, making roads, traders moving their goods, women fetching water from the wells and children walking to school. Mayor Abdikadir Sayid is holding a meeting with his District Council while two elders inspect a new check dam that is expected to keep floods from the town. Fatima has just returned from collecting rent from her new house tenant.

They all wake up early to work before Somalia’s blazing sun hit the mid-day mark.

The surge of activities in the town of 5000 people has not always been like this. In fact this town has always been a place where victims of conflict, storms and drought gather to seek help. For years it has always been a place to get some food from humanitarian agencies. Most people here are people who are in the process of picking up their lives after the devastation of the 2010 famine.

But a combination of creative projects is trying to change the way development is delivered to poor communities in Somalia or in the larger picture of things the way to communities the strength to survive the shocks of disasters.

The projects being implemented by World Vision on behalf a consortium called SomReP is creating jobs and helping communities build their own infrastructure while at the same time cushioning from the shocks of natural and manmade disasters.

A total of 1450 people work been enrolled in various economic activities in the district.

Some are working to improve roads that are critical in reaching the markets while some are building earth damns and other water storage facilities that will help them survive the long drought seasons.

Those who work have been carefully selected from poor families – most of them survivors of the 2013 cyclone while others lost most of their livestock during the 2010 famine.

When they work, they are given a US$69 food voucher which they can redeem from local shopkeepers who have been contracted by SomReP though World Vision. About US$100,000 is being pumped into the economy of town every month and you can actually feel the energy at all levels.

“It is a good thing when people have money in their pockets especially money that they have worked for,” Mayor Sayid says.

In all the years that he lived here, Mayor Sayid has never seen projects combining efforts in order to create the impact that he is seeing now. And he has stories to illustrate the successes that he has seen.

One of the many is Fatima, a poor woman who works to building the roads in the town. The US$69 that she receives has helped her save money from various sources and through that she was able to build a one-bedroom house that she now rents out.

“I have never in my life thought I could own a house,” Fatima says. “Most of my money always go into buying food but look at me now. Look at me.”

The other part of the project has helped to build check dams that will direct floodwaters from entering the town during the rain season. This means that the half of the town that normally gets flooded every year will longer need to seek new homes when it rains.

The projects have also supported the communities to build new water sources – earth dams and underground tanks that stores rain water – thus lowering the cost of water and the distances and time that families use in search of water of for domestic and livestock use.

There is also another aspect where community members are trained in technical skills like carpentry to enable them to find or create jobs.

On the outskirts of the town, a few men are working on a new concept of rangeland rehabilitation. The Farmer Managed Natural Resource (FMNR) is some kind of experiment on how to rehabilitated wasted rangelands into lush areas for grazing. Once the area is rehabilitated, it becomes a source of knowledge for farmers and can transfer the skill to their own farms.

All these combined efforts are geared build community resilience by giving them economic options during hard times. With multiple skills and optional resource base, their backs will be stronger when the next disaster strikes – in this case it is the severe drought that’s currently affecting 3.2 million people in the country.