From IRIN News, humanitarian news and analysis from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, on Sept. 9: BILFOUDA - Oumou (pictured right) is much like any other Nigerien gardener during this desert country’s most fertile season. She wakes up at 5:00 AM. The slight, forty-year-old woman eats breakfast. She works for five hours in her garden, tending to manioc and mandarins, peppers and potatoes.
“Watering all these plants is the hardest. I go from row to row and there always seems to be more,” said the gardener.
But when Niger’s Sahelian sun blisters, this gardener puts away her watering pail at the edge of the well by dragging herself forward with outstretched hands, near-empty pail on her head, knees swinging in a semi-circle propelling her forward.
Paralysed by polio at a young age, the now 40-year-old Oumou started gardening two years ago with the help of local non-profit community-based organization Re-adaptation for the Blind and Other Handicapped Persons (PRAHN). The organisation gave her wood for a fence, tools, fertiliser and seeds, and provided materials for her and her siblings to build a well. UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, is trying to incorporate this and other similar gardening projects into government social sector reforms. To join, Oumou had to prove her disability, property ownership, and a willingness to till the cracked earth.
“I really did not think I could do it. Me, a gardener? I did not even think it was possible.” But it was not her paralysis that had held her back. Rather, Oumou said she had never imagined raising US$3000 to start her garden, which is about five times the average annual salary in Niger, according to 2007 World Bank figures.
Disabled people run 40 year-round ‘survival gardens’ in rural dusty towns in the western regions of Tillaberi and Dosso, each more than 100km from Niamey.
PRAHN director Zama Soumana Pate told IRIN the gardens are more about survival than gardening, “They get so much more than gardening tools. We want to give them tools for life.”
PRAHN provides the gardeners advice on maternal health, school enrolment for children, distributes impregnated mosquito nets, helps participants install latrines, and if they prove to be responsible hard working gardeners, loans them a small sheep or goat to bring in more income.
The gardeners must pay back almost US$500 from PRAHN’s approximate US$3500 investment. Invisible, but still a financial burden Claudio Rini, the West Africa director of an international organisation specialising in disability issues, Handicap International, told IRIN generally, families and communities push aside disabled West Africans because they are seen as unproductive.
A 2001 Niger government study estimated there were more than 100,000 disabled persons in Niger, or about one percent of the population, at the time. The World Health Organization estimates the number is ten times higher, based on its calculation that on average, disabled persons form about eight to 10 percent of a country’s population — or more than one million in Niger, based on the 2006
population.
But Rini says it is hard to get an accurate count of disabled persons in West Africa because of varied definitions of disability, the difficulty census takers have in getting accurate sensitive health information, and because most disabled people are, simply, overlooked.
“As a result of their impairment, disabled people are forgotten because it is harder for them to earn money [rendering them invisible]. They are not quite excluded, but definitely marginalised and discriminated against.”
Rini said when economic problems hit a community, families taking care of a financially- dependent disabled person will feel the impact more deeply.
“The handicapped person will become more of a financial burden to the family, which will lead to resentment against them born not by any set beliefs, but rather by the unfavourable economic situation.”
Bucking the trend In a country where the World Food Programme estimates about 40 percent of the population is chronically malnourished, Oumou says her family is eating a variety of produce they rarely purchased before because it was more expensive than their daily meal of millet, including zucchinis, carrots, tomatoes, cabbage.
“My family used to loan me money so I could buy straw to weave mats. But now, I am the one feeding them from my garden.” She says her family had never paid much attention to her, but now she is the one they count on to pay school and clothing expenses for her siblings’ five children. Her neighbours eat from her garden. People come from dozens of kilometres away looking for leafy vegetables to make sauces and cures for ulcers and jaundice.
“It was like I was not really here before, but now they see me.”She says she earns more than US$300 every year in sales from her garden.
"Sometimes people come for leafy greens from as far away as the airport [20 kilometres]. I sell it for 25 francs [five US cents] for a handful.” But Oumou says she and her family eat most of what they grow. “This stuff is really quite delicious. We prefer to keep it for ourselves and share it with neighbours.”
