Mohammad Dreiss is one of 20 members of the farmer horticultural group supported by Self Help Africa in the village of Adhasvai, in the Halhal District of the Keren Project.
A returnee with his family in the late 1990s from the refugee camps in Sudan, the locally born villager is one of several group members who are supplying tomatoes and other horticultural produce to the local market, thanks to the small rainwater storage dam and irrigation channels which the project constructed in the locality.
Mohammad Dreiss and his group received a loan from the project towards the cost of purchasing a pump to irrigate their land, and they were supplied with seed stock to enable them to grow tomatoes, potatoes, chilli, sweet pepper, swiss chard and other vegetables.
When he first returned from Sudan, the local farmer says that he grew traditional cereal crops such as teff and maize, and that vegetables simply weren’t an option for him because of the shortage of water and limited rainfall in the region.
Built at a cost of approximately 120,000 Eritrean nakfa ($9,400 approx), Mohammad Dreiss and the other members of his group undertook much of the building work on the dam project, and built terracing and check dams to guide the rainfall into the dam area.
‘In the past our people were semi-nomadic farmers who had to travel with our animals to find grazing and water for at least some of the year. Since we have developed this horticulture site we have been able to generate enough money to live well from the sale of our produce,’ he says.
In recent years, Self Help Africa has also provided the farmers group at Adhasvai with orange and lemon tree seedlings, from which they will soon be reaping an additional benefit. Alongside the dam construction – which enables the farmers to retain and store rainfall in the area, and provides a water source from which they can irrigate their land - the project, with the support of the farmers themselves, also built close to a kilometre of water channels, through which they can direct the water to different plots, by way of a series of sluice gates along its length.
‘There was no tradition of growing vegetables in this village before we started this project, but now we have them not only for our own families, but also for others in the locality to buy in the market,’ he added. |
Self Help Africa in Eritrea |
Self Help Africa began working in ritrea in the late 1990s, with a pilot programme to distribute seed potatoes in famine affected areas.
Since then a series of five year area based projects - at Mendefera, Emni Haili, Keren, and Gogne - have been implemented. |
