NEWS / PRESS BBOK

How to help a village acquire a Platform

                     The Observer, 22 February 1998. 

"The dinner wasn’t ready so my husband beat me. Then we got this new machine…"
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Alex Duval Smith
Balanfina, Mali 

IN A COUNTRY where women weave elegant bracelets out of discarded coloured plastic and men fashion useful objects from old oil cans, there are no prizes for ingenuity. 

But even Malians were impressed five years ago, when a Swiss man with a flowing white beard turned up in a Sahel desert village bearing four hunks of steel which were to liberate women, give children the opportunity to play as well as work and improve literacy. 

Now, Roman Imboden’s « multifunctional platform » -  a generator, alternator, mill and hulling machine – is processing rice and millet, welding metals, lighting bulbs and pumping water in 40 villages of this west African country where most cannot read and write and only a minority eat three meals a day. 

The platform runs on diesel but in some places has been refined to be fuelled by nuts from the Mexican pourghere bush.

Balanfina, close to the Guinean border in southern Mali, is 30 miles from the nearest Tarmac road and can only be reached by foot or a bumpy one-hour drive in a 4x4 vehicle.

Like their neighbours, the 1200 people of Balanfina live in earth-brick huts with thatched roofs. Life in this remote place, which must produce almost everything it wishes to consume, is a slog.

But unlike other villages in the area, Balanfina has an electricity cable running from its well to a corrugated iron structure that seems to have replaced the old mango tree as everyone’s favourite meeting place : the platform.

« It has certainly made our lives easier », said Kani Sidibe, an elderly woman chosen with two others – because they can read and write – to head the village platform management committee.

« The women of the village can get their shea nuts ground in a machine instead of having to break them open on a wall. We finish our work sooner so we can start preparing dinner, or help the men in the fields ».

« We have time to do a little more gardening and take care with our sauces. That means the men are happier, too" »

Siacka Sidibe, the committee’s treasurer agreed : « We women work so very hard. There is no let-up for us, even when we are ill. So we need every bit of help we can get.

Balanfina platform was installed in august 1994 and is now managed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

Laurent Coche, the UNDP worker who supervises the platform scheme in Mali, said : « Mills are not new to Mali but there is an ongoing problem of their being inaccessible or going bankrupt when the crops fail. Under this scheme, the villages administer the equipment themselves ».

« It is in the villagers interest to keep milling prices competitive since the platform has other functions – hulling water pumping, lighting, welding and sawing – which the village comes to depend upon » 

The structure is, to Western eyes, an impressive blend of the ingeniousness that characterises poor countries and dependable European technology an eight-horsepower engine, made in India, with belt-drives and other exposed moving parts. Villagers can have spares made in the nearest town. 

But in a part of the world where sustainable development is still only theory and the white man’s aid is considered also to be his responsibility, there are problems.

Jamako Sidibe, a 20 year-old shepherd, was trained UNDP workers to be Balanfina’s platform mechanic. If village committee pays hun percent of the platform takings. 

Sanata Traore, the UNDP worker who has brought us to Balanfina, is unhappy with Jamako Sidibe’s performance. One of the bulling machines has been out of action for several weeks because of a broken filter and he has failed to get a new part made. 

All you had to do was go to Bougouni, hand over the part and 2,000 African francs, she told him. 

« But I knew you would come sooner or later », he said limply. « Besides, the other hulling machine is working and anyway. I have my cattle to look after. 

Traore shook her head : « Sometimes the villages just will not understand. This machine to their minds, is magic so it should not need maintaining ».

Balanfina, which like the rest of Mali has enjoyed two years of good cotton crops, has not yet faced the problem of a dreadful year in which the women – who traditionally process all crops – cannot afford to bring their maize, shea nuts, rice, sorghum or millet to be ground or hulled.

In such a year earnings from the platform might decline so much that diesel would be too expensive and the mechanic would be laid off. Bourama Bagayogo, the village’s specially trained welder, would also be out of work. Most crucially, if the generator was not operating, neither would the pump bringing water from the well.

Coche conceded the platform had pitfalls but insisted it was the most complete development tool he had come across for rural areas. « You cannot put a price on the wonderful opportunities electricity provides and extent to which the women’s situation can be improved by it. They have been freed from hours at the pestle and beatings from husbands whose dinner was not ready, he said ». 

But the platform’s future is not assured. Under plans that rely on villages borrowings to pay a share of the platform’s $2,500 cost, the UNDP hopes to take the magic machine to a further 450 Malian villages, reaching 5 percent of the 10 millions people who live in this mostly desert country, which is four times the size of the United Kingdom.

Coche said : « The UNDP with some help from USAID is putting in nearly £3 million over five years but that is less than half the money we need’s ».

The women of Balanfina hope other villages will be as lucky as they have been.

However, treasurer Sidibe conceded that for women the platform had the same draw –back as the washing machine can have for women in the develop world : it doesn’t put more hours in the day, just frees time to do other housework.

« The best we can hope for is for our men to be happier, she said. Then they treat us better ».
Alex Duval Smith