The goal of this internship is to finish my studies at Delft University of Technology. Within the project in Senegal, I'm going to make a probabilistic dike design along the Senegal river. This river is located in the northern part of Senegal, on the border with Mauritania.

Within the project, I'm going to look at the dike height and linked to this, the acceptable failure probability of the dike. An interesting aspect of the project is that the development of the hinterland behind the dike is unknown, so that several acceptable failure probabilities may be adopted. The project just began, and so first of all, I will gather a lot of information which I can later use for my calculations.

Description of project

The problem grew beyond control in the late 1990’s. The River Basin Management Organisation OMVS has been seeking solutions for more than a decade now, without finding a viable sustainable solution.

This project aims at rehabilitation of the flood plains, taking away the favourable habitat for typha. The project will reduce the aquatic weed pests by construction of polders in the flood plains. Thus an area with negative impact on the livelihood of the riparian communities will be replaced by 3100 ha of arable land with a potential for further economic development.

Short-term objectives of the project:

• Design and realise a polder system in the river flood plains with polder dikes along the main river channel and drainage of the flood plains to regulate the physical conditions for controlling over 3000 hectares of aquatic weed infestation between Rosso and Richard Toll.
• Create the basic conditions in the polder for profitable land use.
• Set-up of a sustainable institutional structure for polder operation and maintainance.