Water Resources People and Issues
Anyway, I outlined a planning technique, possibly based too much on the way
we do it in the United States, but which would get the local people involved in
deciding how to go about developing their resources. They're not dumb people,
but they're not academic people, and they don't do a lot of writing. Many of
them don't speak French or English, but have their own language. But from
what I'm told, they're quite intelligent and they do a good job of managing the
resources they have. So I wrote a report with a schedule of public meetings
throughout the basin and a plan for developing a number of small projects,
mostly from groundwater. Essentially it would have the OMVG staff, with the
assistance of
do the same thing we would do if we were making a
basin study in this country, only geared to those people and finding out what
they wanted and what they were ready, willing, and able to do.
I found that there are many water resource developments in Africa including
some in The Gambia, that have been built with Western money, and even
though they did a good job building them, they fall into disrepair when the
Westerners go home because the local people don't keep them up.
The
contract was to end in December 1987, and I went back to the
Gambia River basin and to Dakar again in the fall of that year to complete the
final report only to find that the OMVG staff hadn't done anything that I
recommended, but were still trying to get money to build the big dams. I
thought the program I had worked out was realistic, but the politicians running
OMVG think in terms of building big dams. We've had the same problem in
this country. We used to have a hard time getting full consideration of the
social and environmental impacts of projects.
When you build a dam, you've got something you can see and sometimes a
pretty lake-if you like lakes rather than flowing rivers-and you can put a
plaque on the dam with a politician's name on it. Sometimes you can even put
the name of the engineers who designed the dam, but particularly the local
politicians love to dedicate dams. I don't know what's going to happen with the
Gambia River, but it's in an area where the population is increasing faster than
their resources are being developed. If the current increase of about 3 percent
a year continues, the population is going to double in about 24 years. So I
guess the six months I spent on that project were wasted, but it was a good
experience for me.
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