Jatropha in Gambia

Today is the exiting big day for starting my first blog on the introduction of Jatropha fuel in the Gambia. The Gambia is a small peacefull country on the West Coast of Africa. This year we live here for 10 years arriving from the Netherlands and we are running a generator business.

A few month ago I was contacted by Mr. Pierre Vanderbeuken, a Belgien post delivery man, invironmentalist and a man who likes to help people, who introduced the Jatropha to us as a usefull oil for our generator clients. From that moment on a serious Jatopha fever attacked me. I started to study the Jatropha tree believe me: it sounded to good to be true. After many month of research I can only say that it is true and that planting as many Jatropha trees as possible this year will make a tremendous change in the lives of all Gambians who are willing to grow the Jatropha tree.

So then I had to start looking for the tree and see it in real life. I friend of us was passing by and I told him about the Jatropha oil and all the possibilities and the good news was he know a place where they are some trees. He dragged me into his car and off we went for a drive along the ‘highway’. The moment he showed me the trees I know that Ihave seen them before and even better that I had 2 trees growing on our compound. Comingback home I checked it and YES, they were there and the good thing is that I didn’t plant them myself, nature brought it there.

Traditionally the Japropha tree (Tabanane in Wolf, one of the local languages) is used as a fencing tree. Because of the poison in the trees it isan easy way to keep cattle out of your compound. These days people are changing into fences made out of blocks so the Jatropha is no longer used.

Knowing now we have our own Jatropha tree I could collect the seeds from the trees and to proof to myself and our staff that the Jatropha oil can be used as fuel I had to press the seeds. Luckely we have a well equipt workshop for the generator repairs complete with a hydraulic press. Now all I needed was something to press it in. So here is what I did: I made some holes in the bottom of a small tomato paste can and filled it up with the seeds. I put the can in stainless streel bowl and we pressed the seeds under the hydraulic press.

I nice small amount of oil was pooring out of the seeds. I tried to light it with a match but this didn’t work. I used a small patch of cotton wool into the pot that was absorbing the oil and this was burning very well for about 20 minutes.

But first things fist:

What does the tree look like?

How do the seeds look like in the tree?

and dry:

The next step was to test how the trees will grow from the seeds and by using the sticks. Cutting sticks from existing trees and starting to grow a new one from there is the locally used way of growing new plants or trees. So we attacked our Jatropha trees:

and we planted them in pots

within a few days the first leafes are growing, we could not believe it. It has been funny to see how some sticks starts developing very very quick and for other it took month but the good thing is, they all started to grow.

In the mean time I put some seeds in pots and 8 (!) days later the first small green thingy was spotted. All the seeds planted came to life and I was surprised by the forces of nature again witnesing how fast the seedlings devellop was so much power, really impressing.

and see how they look now after 5 months

In the mean time I kept on cummunicating with Pierre about how to go about promoting the Jatropha in The Gambia. Luckely Pierre has some good contacts with the Gambian Gouvernement and he was giving them the news that there is now a very enthousiatic Dutch lady in the country (with a shop!!) and that we would like to know who to contact to move on with our project. Yes, by then we start naming it a contract. The next day I received a phone call from Kemo Ceesey introducing himself as the man of GREC (Gambia Renewable Energy Centre) and told me that he was asked by hte gouvernment to contact me about plant oil. That same evening we spend hours and hours talking and exchanging ideas. Kemo just returned from studying economics in the UK and he was asked to help them out with GREC. Appearently the centre was not so active at that time. Now you can talke my word for it: the centre is alive again with Kemo there. Together we started to work on a proposal that we had to send to the government to ask for there blessing and also to keep them up to date with our plans.

Then I started to work on an information brochure to give people something in their hands to read and to talk about and thhis was later on transmitted into a website: www.jatropha-fuel.com. To convince a whole country to start growing a tree that they know but that is no longer part of their daily life is not an easy task but I think one can say that money talks and we growing Jatropha will start making money for people. The nice thing about this projects is that we don’t need an organisation or an NGO to make this work. This project is completely in the hand of the Gambian community. Growing a tree from a stick is not difficult and specially the Jatropha tree is an easy one: it’s drought resistant and animals don’t touch it because of the poison in the leaves.

I will later on add an other part on this blog regarding the possibilities of Jatropha