A Women's Cooperative Grows Together

Members

Plots

60+

Families fed

+35%

Market income

The Koumpentoum women's cooperative started with a half-acre plot, a shared dream and a question nobody could answer: could a group of women grow a community's food security from scratch? Two seasons later, the answer is a thriving two-plot garden, a market stall and sixty families eating better.

More than a garden: a cooperative's leap of faith

In Koumpentoum, Senegal, the cooperative's 24 members had long grown food for their own households — but each household worked alone, with limited tools and no shared strategy. When Dilulu's community-garden program proposed a shared plot, collective training and pooled harvests, the members took the leap.

Learning together, growing together

Weekly training sessions covered the practices that made the difference: drip irrigation to stretch scarce water, crop planning to ensure year-round harvests, seed saving for independence, and cooperative bookkeeping so earnings were managed fairly and transparently.

"We used to grow food alone and struggle alone. Now we grow together, sell together, and plan together. The garden is our school, our market and our meeting place."
— — Fatou Diop, cooperative chair

The results

24 women trained in sustainable farming techniques
2 plots under year-round cultivation
60+ families benefiting from the cooperative's harvest
+35% market income through a cooperative sales stall

Members have reinvested their earnings into a second plot and a seed bank that now holds local, drought-tolerant varieties. The cooperative's garden has become the community's meeting place — and its safety net.

Looking ahead

The cooperative's next goal is a small storage facility so surplus harvests can be preserved and sold in the dry season. What began as a leap of faith has become a model of collective resilience.

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