AWEIL –In many parts of South Sudan the rains are a curse as much as a blessing. Heavy rain often leads to flooding which damages crops or washes them away entirely, leaving people even more vulnerable to food insecurity. The World Food Programme (WFP) through its Food Assistance For Asset-creation (FFA) activities helps communities to strengthen their resilience to such shocks. In Northern Bahr el Ghazal State several communities have opted to construct infrastructure that prevents flood waters from destroying crops and homes.
Each morning on the outskirts of Aweil, the capital of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State, hundreds of men and women holding spades, pick-axes, hoes and buckets come to work at the construction site of a road between the villages of Udhum and Kuacriac. This is not any ordinary 8-kilometre stretch of road, it is also a 2-metre high flood control dyke.
Last year flood waters devastated the crops planted in the area between these two villages. With no real harvest of their own the people had to rely on buying food from the markets, but the flood waters made access very difficult.
“We lost crops, people had to swim to get to the next village. The sick or women in labour couldn’t get to the clinic except if they found a tall man to carry them on their shoulders and wade through the flood waters,” said Garang Adoub Adoub, a resident of Marial hamlet. He leads a team of community members involved in the road construction activity.
The communities in the villages affected by the floods agreed to construct a dyke-road that would not only enable people to directly access markets, schools and health services but also protect villages from the negative impact of annual flooding, explained Adoub Adoub.
They raised the issue with Aweil Project for Agriculture Development (APAD), a community-based organisation, and approached WFP to obtain support. WFP’s FFA activities provide conditional food assistance to help communities create assets to restore livelihoods and to strengthen resilience against future shocks.
With support from UKaid, WFP helps meet the immediate food needs of vulnerable people while they build or improve assets that will benefit the whole community. Together this helps make individuals and communities more resilient. Sustainability is embedded into projects because the communities themselves help identify the problems to be tackled, plan the projects and then implement them.The community in Aweil hope to complete the dyke-road by the end of June before the onset of the heavy rains.
“It has been our dream to have this road to connect us to the market, that is why I am here to work,” said Adir Ngor Ngor, a team leader at the construction site. “We don’t want people drowning or bitten by snakes anymore because they tried to cross the swamps when the place is flooded,” added Ngor.
Beads of sweat covered her face as she compacted the earth on the side of the dyke-road using a spade. She tuned a song and the rest of the women working on the edifice joined her. They are among 88,000 people receiving assistance in Northern Bahr Ghazal through FFA schemes this year.
FFA activities in South Sudan aim to assist food insecure households in rural South Sudan. Priority areas are identified through food security analysis including the Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring System (FSNMS) and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Participating households are further selected through community consultations. This year WFP plans to support more than 470,000 people in the country through FFA activities.