ABOUT US
WaterforAfricanWomen.org is a humor-based non-profit organization that addresses aid and trust in an entirely unique way. We listen to underserved women and learn the barriers they face. We then help develop their village garden with solar-powered irrigation, shifting the women from being unpaid water carriers, to becoming growers of organic food on a sustainably large scale, with high investment returns.
We train women in best agricultural practices, management and village banking around their own ideas. We aim for our projects to become self-sufficient after three to four years. Our goal is a gender-transformative agriculture where women teach women, feed their village, gain respect, improve their health, drink clean water, sell their crops, pay for their children’s schooling, and manage their own money.
And all with Great Dignity.
Jonathon Ellison
(Our Founder and Executive Director)
Over the past 30 years, Jonathon has worked as a landscape architect specializing in sustainable design, on five continents. After a personal tragedy in 2014, he has focused his energy on bringing water to women in Africa.
Jonathon uses humour to build trust with women and their villages as a means to nourishing sustainable humanitarian design. He has taught sustainable land use planning at the graduate level in Sri Lanka, India, The United States and Senegal, where his main interests are local design solutions to local ecological challenges with a strong focus on gender.
Jonathon’s art is connecting with people; a visceral belief that humour leads to profound trust. If you want to find him in a village, follow the laughter. Watch the sheer relief of children allowed to break a rule, or who play with an adult clown who knows how to cut loose and play like a kid. Some call this healing. With adults this humour brings a different healing, where hilariously breaking a rule tied to a social norm around gender can allow for the conversation to begin.
And a big conversation in Africa is the immediate change required to understand how women’s autonomy, food security and climate change mitigation go hand in hand. Jonathon’s educational credentials include three degrees, in Communications, Community Economic Development and Sustainable Landscape Design, from McGill and Concordia Universities in Montréal, and the Conway School of Sustainable Design in Massachusetts. He is also a graduate from the prestigious Montreal School of Mime, in Montréal, Québec.
Ms. Awa Ba
Awa Ba is Senegalese Peulh, born and raised in La Casamance in the south of Sénégal. She is unrelenting in her belief that the women of her country have unfair and difficult workloads, and that they deserve better. Awa recently finished a three-month training program in rural Québec, where she learned from some of Canada’s top organic farmers, including The Way’s Mills Market Garden in Ayer’s Cliff and Du Coq à l’Àne in Bury, QC. Ms. Ba now applies that training to our projects, so that the underserved rural women we work with can learn more productive, easier and healthier ways to grow food. Awa is a key component of our program to teach women how to get a better price for their harvests, and to adapt cultural habits to the massive change that solar powered irrigation brings to their garden project. Ms. Ba is seen here discussing women-in-agriculture with Canada’s minister of Agriculture, the Right Honorable Marie-Claude Bibeau (September 2019, Bury, Québec).
Ms. Alimatou Badji
Alimatou Badji is Sénégalese Diola, from the central region of Kaolack. She is the top agronomist from the local organization APROFES, The Association for the Promotion of the Senegalese Woman. Ms. Badji has been helping the underserved women of her country for over ten years and is a key partner for us in our attempts to look at the challenges rural women face from a perspective of Whole System Design. What this means is that Alimatou is often the first to convince entire communities of women that their ability to grow healthier food, their strength in numbers, their inherent dignity, their unwavering support of their families, their willingness to learn to read and write, and their wanting to become stronger in both organic agriculture and new methods of selling their crops, are part of a bigger design that takes everything into account. Ms. Badji also received training in Canada with the support of Crossroads International.