Every day, in Baguinéda, a small rural town in Kati Circle in the Koulikoro region of southern Mali, Tenin Traoré sells her biscuits on a sidewalk corner. Baguinéda town has 32 villages and nearly 60,000 inhabitants. At 40 years old, married and with 12 children, Tenin describes herself as "a working housewife".
Taking care of twelve children is not an easy task. And for Tenin, her modest cake business is not a luxury. Far from it. It allows her to provide for her family. So every day, as soon as she finishes selling her cakes, Tenin goes to the Baguineda market to do her shopping: enough to feed her family, and what she needs to make the next batch of cakes.
It's hard to imagine the market stalls in Baguineda today, filled with all kinds of products, but it wasn't always this easy: "Before, it was hard to find what you needed. Products were expensive," Tenin says. "We couldn't find what we needed from the same supplier, we had to look for several producers," she adds.
In Mali, a landlocked, climate-vulnerable Sahelian country where more than 75 percent of the population lives in rural areas and where agriculture accounts for nearly 40 percent of GDP, poverty and food security are real issues in some parts of the country.
Since 2010, Malian authorities have been stepping up efforts to improve food security throughout the country. In support, the African Development Fund allocated $51.8 million to the Project to Improve Food and Nutritional Security in the Koulikoro Region (PRESAN-KL) in 2014.
Thirteen rural markets and marketplaces have been established in the region, and 102 kilometers of roads have been built thanks to the project. This has made a major difference: a range of products can now be transported regularly and at lower cost to new, better-designed markets that are resistant to climatic hazards.
It is thanks to the PRESAN-KL project that the Baguineda market was also created. "Now the vegetables are always well laid out and everything is clean, even when it rains," says Tenin Traoré. "We shop at affordable prices and now we can find everything we need at the market," she says.
Now Tenin doesn't have to worry: she can always find enough to make her cakes and the lower prices of products sold at the market allow her to earn more money.
By December 2021, the project had benefited 158,000 people, 58% of whom were women.
The PRESAN-KL project had one major objective: to sustainably boost production and productivity in the rice and market garden sectors, and thus farmers' incomes, by focusing on water management, increasing, diversifying and making agricultural production available. Beyond that, the project has had other welcome benefits in the region, such as the rehabilitation and equipping of old and newly built health centers.
