NEWS / PRESS BBOK

How to help a village acquire a Platform

THE TORONTO STAR (Toronto), Friday, December 24, 1999.

"Magic machine’ pushes Mali into 21^st century" 
U.N. – funded motor gives power to villagers  

By SUSAN LINNEE (associated Press)

BALANFINA, Mali, 
When the sun sets on the last day of the 20^th century, the inhabitants of this remote West African village will eat their customary evening meal of ground maize porridge  and okra sauce. 

The soft sounds of the African night will mingle with the lowing of cattle shuffling home, and the glow of kerosene lamps will dot the darkness. 

There will be no millennium  madness in Balanfina – its people don’t  measure time in centuries. 

And there are no Y2K worries : On the first day of the 21^st century, masinanga poroze   - the magic machine – will sputter to life once again and churn out power to grind maize, husk rice, charge batteries, pump water and solder a broken metal chair. 

It’s not that the 1,350 villagers don’t care about the future. Mallan Sidibe, the village chief, ticks off their needs : a dispensary, a mud-brick school, a water storage tank and a better road to the outside world.

Thanks to the magic machine – a 10-horsepower motor mounted on a metal plat-form to which mills, grinders, presses and an alternator can be attached – the subsistence farmers of Balanfina have begun turning their desires into reality in one of the poorest countries in the world. 

« Before, the women did everything by hand », said Kani Sidibe, president of the women’s group that manages the machine.

« Now, there is more time for other things, and the women can raise crops to sell in the market ».

Designed in the early 1990s for the U.N. Industrial and Development Organization, it was deemed not industrial enough. But for Balanfina and 45 other villages in Mali, it is just fine. 

The machine runs on diesel fuel or oil pressed from the black seeds of the pourghere plants that grow in the region.

« This isn’t really a development project in the classic sense », said Laurent Coche of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP). 

« It’s more of a social change project. The people have to decide whether they want it, they have to decide what to do with it – and they have to come up with part of the money to pay for it ».

The program’s only stipulation is that women run the project – from running the machine to deciding how  much to charge for its services to keeping the books and paying for maintenance.

« Not everyone  likes the changes. Men have to be encouraged to see them as positive for the welfare of every-one, » said Nalini Burn, a project consultant.

For a long time, elders resisted sending girls to school. Now, most attend classes.

And the women who have been elected by the village to run the machine have learned to read and do basic arithmetic.

Without the machine, the women and girls of Balanfina and thousands of other villages across Africa must walk long distances every day to fetch water that’s often unclean. 

Finn Tore Rose, the head of UNDP in Mali, said the goal is to have the machines in 500 villages covering 10 per cent of the country’s rural population by 2003.