A friend of fadeco visits TZ - Richard's report

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In the summer of 2002 Sekiku Joseph, the founder of FADECO, stayed with me and my family in Taliesin in west Wales. From time to time he asked me to visit him at his place in Tanzania.

I wasn't sure what my purpose would be - having a wonderful experience and using up some of Joseph's valuable time didn't seem like enough.

But in the end I decided that I would go. My hope was that now we had set up friends of fadeco the visit would help to strengthen the link between our two communities and that I could bring back with me some understanding of development in the area and FADECO's part in it.

I also knew of a little piece of appropriate technology that may or may not be useful to some people out there - but more of that later.

The trip was great. I was on the receiving end of so much hospitality, kindness and good humour. And I learnt a great deal. Of course there's so much I don't understand about Tanzania or FADECO or development in general but I did come home knowing a lot more than I did.

So I've put together a few notes in order to share my perceptions with other friends of fadeco. My overall impressions of FADECO were very positive. I hope that I can encourage you to continue with your support.

Richard Collins - January 2003

The area and the people

The area that FADECO is based in is the Karagwe district of Kagera region in NW Tanzania. It has a very good climate with lots of sunshine and two good rainy seasons per year.

The agricultural potential is great. But Karagwe is remote from the capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam (five days drive), and its development is way behind that which has taken place just over the border in Uganda or in other regions of Tanzania.

The main economic activity is agriculture and most of that is at something near subsistence level - grow it, eat it, maybe take a small amount of surplus to market if you're wealthy enough to own a bicycle. People have plenty of food - it's not like the drought regions of Africa that are in the news from time to time.

But there is not much that people can do to improve their circumstances and there is no free education and no free health care. In a poor family if you're badly ill you die quietly at home.

It's a beautiful area and some people are healthy and happy much of the time. Many others are too poor; with very bad housing, lack of education, poor nutrition, and sickness.

The remoteness means that large scale economic development isn't going to happen for a while. But there is lots of scope for small scale improvements in people's quality of life - better diet, housing, improved agricultural practices and appropriate education. These are the areas in which FADECO is active.

The origins of FADECO

The story of FADECO starts with a young man, a student of agriculture in Makerere University in Kampala (Uganda), making his first trip to the Karagwe district of Tanzania where his parents had come from and where many of his family still lived.

This man going back to his roots was, of course, was Sekiku Joseph. What he found was an area in a state of development far behind that of Uganda with a very low standard of living.

The poverty surprised him very much and he resolved to try to do something about - to improve things in a small way for his people.

A few years later Joseph settled in the village of Nyakasimbi, bought some land, and started farming in the simple unmechanised way practised in the area. He introduced new crops, crop varieties, and unheard of techniques like composting and double-digging.

Everything he did was done with the intention of demonstrating useful new practices that others could copy. Soon he was running workshops in Nyakasimbe and the surrounding area.

Some of the problems people had in the area were environmental. Much of the hill-top land was very bare with only grasses and a few acacia trees growing in a thin soil. The practice of setting fire to the grass every dry season resulted in soil erosion when the rains came, the destruction of tree seedlings and a lowering of the water table (which meant that people were walking long distances to collect water for domestic use). Joseph planted trees on his land in among the crops in agroforestry style.

He used species like Grevillea robusta which have nitrogen producing root nodules that improve the soil fertility when young and which later can be cut for firewood or eventually timber. With help from Tree Aid he established tree nurseries and helped people to plant trees on their land so they had their own supply of firewood.

There are around seventy planted woodlots (plantations for fire wood) in the Nyakasimbi area now.

Sekiku Joseph's work grew and changed in response to the needs and demands of local people. In 1996 he and a group of others set up a small independent non-profit making organisation called FADECO.

The need to communicate led to the creation of an office in the nearest town of Kayanga where there is electricity and telephone/ internet access. The work continues but on a larger scale. FADECO now works on two levels. It still is involved in running workshops and demonstrations of quite simple new farming or environmental practices that will improve the quality of life of poor people locally.

It also operates as an information centre and catalyst for change at a regional level. FADECO produces a quarterly newsletter on development issues (avidly read - the area has no newspapers or magazines). It runs a resource centre with a library of books journals and information on CD ROM.

More information on its current programmes can be found by clicking on the links to the left.

How to grow fruit and eat it

I felt I should have a questioning attitude and a healthy scepticism about everything I was seeing on my visit. When I arrived in Nyakasimbi it was just in time to attend a meeting of twenty head-teachers of local schools who had come to meet Joseph to access a grant from Seeds for Africa to plant fruit trees around their schools.

But surely everybody around here plants fruit trees I thought to myself - why do you need an NGO involved?

But I learnt more. Okay, food is easy to grow in Karagwe district: there are two rainy seasons per year. However, people have poor diets with very little variety. They don't eat much fruit (apart from plantain bananas) even though it is easily grown and the vitamins would improve their health.

But now, with this project, local children will learn about caring for trees and will be encouraged to eat the fruit that they've grown. This should result in a simple but very positive cultural change that will have a lasting effect on people's health.

This is a small project but to me it was an illustration of how FADECO works. FADECO is the catalyst - communicating with schools, setting up meetings, applying for grants. And this seems to be the role that FADECO now has in the area.

I was impressed with many other examples I saw of their work as catalyst for change - providing information, putting people in touch with each other, suggesting ideas.

Some distance (maybe it was half a day's drive) from Nyakasimbi on my way back to the airport and home we saw a familiar figure pushing a bicycle up a hill. I was very surprised to see someone I recognised in what seemed like a remote spot. It was one of the teachers who had attended the Seeds for Africa meeting the week before.

We gave him a lift to his home and he proudly showed us his tree nursery. I commented to Joseph that this man had come a long way to be at the meeting. He said that many of the people had come such distances; some of the people coming to FADECO for help or advice came from much further away.

Transport is bad in Karagwe district and people are poor. This willingness of people to travel a long way to participate in FADECO's activities seemed to me a very good measure of the value of its work.

More reasons for supporting friends of fadeco

My guess is that large scale economic development is going to take a long time to reach Karagwe.

Meanwhile FADECO seems to me to be responding to the demands of people in the area and serving as a catalyst for changes that are appropriate and sustainable. FADECO is much more grass roots led than some rural initiatives I see around me in west Wales, for instance. And the environmental issues FADECO addresses are those linked with the quality of people's lives like access to water or fuel-wood.

I saw and heard about some development white elephants while I was in TZ. The American who wanted to send in solar cookers to an area with high cloud cover - that sort of thing. In one area a UK charity had supplied concrete tanks for the storage of rain water.

To collect the water they set up corrugated metal sheets on poles next to the house. People would have a very poor house with a leaky roof and next to it some brand new corrugated iron sheets covering nothing. It was ludicrous but also humiliating for the people concerned.

Only some local interference persuaded the charity that the roofing sheets should go on the roof. How does this sort of thing happen? I think it's lack of local input - it's well-meaning people coming in from outside with insufficient local understanding.

FADECO, in contrast, is run by locals who are responding directly to local needs. I won't say that they are perfect but they should avoid the mistakes that foreign NGOs sometimes make.

I think if you want to support development work and make a difference in the lives of poor people you should support FADECO. Perhaps you can persuade some others to join friends of fadeco.

The pole-lathe

When Sekiku Joseph was here in Wales last summer I took him to see Bob Shaw who teaches green wood-working and woodland management in his wood south of Aberystwyth. I explained that this sort thing was really recreational here and not exactly a big part of the rural economy.

We were looking at a pole-lathe, a machine for turning wood that is powered by a foot-operated treadle and a bendy pole. Joseph said that it might be appropriate technology where he lives in a village without electricity.

I had my doubts but I took a few tools and plans for a pole lathe with me to Tanzania. Surely they must have these simple things out there? But Joseph had travelled over a great part of northern TZ and other areas conducting workshops and he had never seen or heard of such a thing.

With the help of a man called Gonzaga Aloyzius who had come over the border from a town in the south of Uganda I made a pole-lathe in Nyakasimbi. Gonzaga is a young carpenter who makes furniture and employs four apprentices.

I was disappointed when he said he had recently started renting an electric lathe but hadn't used it much yet. But he was very interested in the pole-lathe.

A local carpenter came and watched (he was ill and not able to do much at the time) and we made some tool handles and a pestle for pounding maize. It was fun doing it but I was sceptical of its value.

But then Gonzaga told me that he was going to send back his electric lathe (it was very expensive to rent) and build a pole-lathe. When I got back to Kampala I received a letter from him, via a relative, thanking me very much and saying that he had already half-built his own pole-lathe and was looking forward to teaching his apprentices how to use it.

Big areas of TZ and Uganda have no electricity. Maybe this simple device will play a part in the livelihood of a few rural craftsmen. Who knows?

[updated 19.2.03]