Botou Primary School Wall Project

Year: 2017
Country: Senegal
Project Status: Funded
Impact Sector: Environment
Project Investment: $3,893.42

Project Launch: 1-5-18

Botou Village is located directly off a major highway. During and after school hours, vehicles often pass directly across the school yard to by-pass traffic. Community members have noticed that as the potholes on the road are getting worse, there are noticeably more large semi-trucks that are cutting through the soccer field on the edge of school creating an unsafe school environment for students.

Parents and teachers have become increasingly concerned for students’ safety, so the community decided to seek the funding to construct a school wall around the perimeter of the schoolyard to keep students safe during and after school hours.

Project Update: 6-8-18

Construction of the school wall is well underway, and community members have engaged in multiple workdays to build the necessary materials such as bricks and the cement foundation. Community engagement in the project is high, and each day a number of men and women volunteer to help speed up the process.

Final Report: 8-8-18

The Botou Primary School Wall has been completed in the area of Tambacounda, Senegal. A committee of villages came together to budget, build, and organize a 275-meter long fence that is 2 meters high of half cement and half fencing to protect kindergarten through sixth-grade students from trucks passing along a major highway. The committee organized every villager into different groups where each group would have a turn to build some section of the wall. In addition to all of the wall building that was completed, another committee was formed to help create a sustainability system that would be used to help strengthen the wall if problems occurred and create a tree garden that would be used to doubly reinforce the school wall. It was a great way to bring the community together.