Senegal's Salt Collectors Tapping Into Climate Change Finance

In the humid heat of Senegal's rainy season, Mbayan Fam points across a bleak expanse of sand dotted with grass to the shallow sea inlet where she and her fellow salt collectors harvest white "gold" with their bare hands.

The wide delta, reached by a flood-prone dirt road, is a tough place to work, and the women lack protective equipment, causing them skin problems. In recent years their incomes have dropped too, as sand swept across the denuded landscape by the wind has silted up half the inlet, the young woman says.

But the salt gatherers of Keur Mboucki municipality, on the western edge of the central region of Kaffrine, are hoping efforts to reforest the inlet's shores with salt-tolerant trees will make life easier for them.

http://news.trust.org/item/20161013100310-akh74

Jeff Attaway

#solar #solr