A glance to Harvesting Water Hyacinth
Video credit: GKA, please do not share

GKA strengthened the harvesting operations over two sites in the south of Benin :
In October 2017 : GKA wrote a guideline draft in order to organize the harvesting procedures (who, when, how, how much : up to bottom approach). A dedicated human resource focused on the implementation of the procedures. The guideline was improved and even changed several times since then due to field experience (bottom up approach). The result of this work is very satisfying :
- In December and January organized the harvesting with partnering with more than several groups of people (54 persons)
- The harvested volume increased from 10-20 t/month to 55 tons of dried water hyacinth in December (equivalent of 500 to 700 tons of fresh plants = 6 football fields!). Right now the harvesting procedures remains manual.
- We completely canceled the use of bags in the packing of dried plant and started a simplified compressed bundle packing on the field. The system in extremely simple (a wood box with a door) : it is cheap, everybody can use it no risk of injury and it is sufficiently effective. The ballots increased our transport rate and also ease the storage.