Crops, herds, forests, the floods which have affected the north of South Sudan for almost three years have swallowed everything up. The town of Bentiu, where tens of thousands of displaced people from neighboring counties have taken refuge, is no more than an island, protected by dikes built with the help of the United Nations. The trees are dead. Carpets of water hyacinths covered the bodies of stagnant water. A proliferation from which the inhabitants of Bentiu have learned to take advantage.
Buckets in hand, around ten women dressed in colorful dresses and lawa collect large armfuls of these water plants with purple flowers from the pond adjoining their displaced camp. Once cut and dried, the hyacinths are burned, and their ash mixed with clay and soaked paper to form a paste. Molds produce the final product: a small cylinder of fuel just under 10 cm in length.
“The trees are all dead.”
An inexpensive product to manufacture in an artisanal manner, this “green coal” has become a popular alternative to traditional fuels. Because the cylinders have the advantage of “giving off no smoke since they do not contain any non-carbonized particles, unlike certain poor quality charcoal and firewood. And they burn longer,” says Jamal Francis Katende, project manager at the World Food Program (WFP).
For the UN organization, which introduced the manufacture of this coal in South Sudan in 2022, the objective is twofold: to allow vulnerable communities to access a cheap and potentially marketable fuel, while helping to limit proliferation water hyacinth, considered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to be “the world’s worst aquatic weed.” And it is the women of Bentiu who benefit first.
“Before, to find wood, I had to leave at 6 a.m. and not return until 6 p.m., because I had no money to rent a canoe. Now I couldn’t even do it, the trees are all dead because of the water,” explains Nyanhial Luoy, 48, who takes care of her ten children alone because her husband is disabled.
After a first pilot phase which ended successfully in June, the WFP wishes to increase the number of women trained in the production of this “green charcoal” from 150 to 2,000 in Bentiu, and to 5,000 in total with its introduction in the Neighboring Upper Nile State, water hyacinth is everywhere.
No longer dependent on humanitarian aid
The organization, which plans to help collectors market fuel, also plans to support the manufacturing of canoes to enable larger quantities of plant collections. “This is one of the many advantages of this project: we can imagine making it with any form of biomass, dried leaves for example,” underlines Simon Riak Gatpan, local employee of the organization.
And, to better use this new fuel, some women also learned to make clay-saving stoves. A 42-year-old widow, Martha Nyayieya sees it as an opportunity to earn a living and no longer depend on the vagaries of humanitarian aid. “We must only count on ourselves,” says this mother of seven children, severely affected by the end of WFP food distributions at the end of August. But faced with increasing food insecurity, funds were released by the UN agency so that food aid could resume in Bentiu in November.
The combined effect of wars and floods brings the number of displaced people in the city to more than 200,000 individuals according to the authorities. And this, at a time of a funding crisis for the humanitarian response in South Sudan, which is experiencing its worst year with a record 76% of residents in need of assistance while only 54% of the response is financed.