Global Mission Stories
from ELCA Global Mission

Milk project brings women hope

By Julie Boutwell-Peterson
ELCA missionary in Senegal

Among the Pulaar nomadic herders in rural northeastern Senegal, milking is a woman's job.

Rising early in the morning and often taking their babies with them to the fields via cloth back-slings, the women milk their cows by hand, carefully catching the white liquid in homemade wooden bowls. 

Even though the job is done by expert hands, it's neither easy nor fast work. But these women are used to tedious jobs. 

A Pulaar woman carries her baby to the field to milk. About 150 women participate in the ELCA-funded herder's cooperative.

Living in grass and stick huts without electricity or running water, the women must prepare family meals over small fires, make many of their own kitchen tools, and fetch water from wells often five miles away.

Still, while the morning milking may be just the beginning of their day, it is also their livelihood, and in many places, the livelihood for the whole village.

Following the morning's work, the still-warm milk is collected in a large jug and several women begin the long journey into the nearest town, traveling by horsecart over miles of poor dirt roads to sell the fresh milk.

In the rainy season, there is a lot of milk -- too much milk flooding the town markets, often spoiling before people can drink it. Prices are rock bottom. In the dry season, however, when the husbands leave their families in order to take their cows south to green grass and water, there is little fresh milk and prices are high.

It was this market phenomenon that spurred the ELCA mission in Senegal to assist locals in starting the "Federation for the Development of Herders."

Pulaar village women transport the milk into town.

Now in its tenth year, the Federation works with a variety of villages and individuals around Linguere, a small town in the interior part of the country, to collect milk, transform it into yogurt and help sell both yogurt and fresh milk in nearby towns as well as some farther away.

"Milk is very fragile," explained ELCA missionary Willie Langdji, who oversees the Federation. "The climate is very hot and, in the dry season, it can spoil in as little as two hours. When we transform it into yogurt, it can keep for three weeks."

Before the Federation was formed, the women were forced to sell their milk very cheaply or, what occurred even more often, lose it to the heat. 

"The Federation is able to make the milk more valuable by making it last longer and by finding markets the women would not otherwise have access to," Langdji said. Using coolers, Federation employees working on a commission take the yogurt via public transportation to the country's larger cities including Dakar, 250 miles away.

Currently the Federation works with five villages in the dry season and about 12 during the rainy season, when daily milk production exceeds 25 gallons a day, according to Souley Ba, the Senegalese Federation employee who is in charge of the milk transformation. There are also 15 individual women in Linguere who sell their milk to the project.

While the Federation pays the greater portion of transport costs, the group is set up as a cooperative in that the women are paid for their milk after the cost of animal feed, aluminum bowls and other needs provided by the Federation are deducted.

Langdji said, historically, the Pulaar herders have not seen their cows as having any real economic value. Herding was a way of life; cows were traded during marriage settlements and otherwise simply milked and kept alive. "Cows were, and are largely still, a status symbol, little else," he said.

Thus, a large aim of the project is to show the villagers that cows are valuable and their milk can make money for families to buy food and medicine.

The next step, if it works, could be significant in the longevity and sustainability of the project. Beginning next year, the Federation would like to convince some of the herders to stay put during dry season in order to reap the benefits of the season's high milk prices.

The Federation plans to help the villages build fences to contain the animals and then stock grass in a portion of the fenced-in area and buy cattle feed. "If we can talk the men into staying home during the dry season and if we can help give them reasons to, they can make good profits as well as reduce the risk of sickness to their cows and to themselves," Langdji said.

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