Hapa nimesoma nikarudia kusoma nikatoka na jambo moja. HUYU BWANA
KATUTUKANA au mnasemaje wanamabadiliko?
On 3/4/13, Abdalah Hamis <hamisznz@gmail.com> wrote:
> *This is the fourth of several blog posts written from Dar es Salaam and
> Morogoro, Tanzania. I'm visiting Tanzania thanks to CARE USA, which has
> paid for my trip with the help of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates
> Foundation. Its purpose, for me at least, is to explore one country's need
> for humanitarian aid and development assistance and to examine America's
> political will and commitment to deliver on its promises.*
>
> The impact of American development aid to Tanzania, and the vast distance
> yet to go, were both evident in abundance during the fifth, and last, day
> that I spent in Tanzania.
>
> In the morning, we flew from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, a one-hour flight
> from the capital in a twin-engine Cessna but a world away. Nestled at the
> center of a group of five Tanzanian districts, Morogoro is a bustling town
> with a busy marketplace and a network of paved thoroughfares that lead to
> dirt roads leading in every direction. But the primary activity here, among
> the 2 million people who live in the five districts around Morogoro, is
> agriculture. When I asked Mvomero district's Anthony Mtaka, the district
> commissioner—the equivalent of a state governor in the United States,
> though appointed by President Kikwete—what percentage of the 300,000 people
> in his district were farmers and peasants, he didn't hesitate. "Ninety-nine
> percent," he answered.
>
> As in most of Tanzania, the majority are desperately poor, subsistence
> farmers. Nearly all of them farm tiny plots, growing barely enough to feed
> their families, if that, and few have any substantial surplus to bring to
> market.
>
> One exception is the Uwawakuda irrigation cooperative farm. More than 900
> Tanzanian farmers, including 414 women, have banded together to farm a
> 5,000-acre spread whose productivity is fed by a pumping station and
> irrigation system that provides underground water to the farm. Originally
> installed three decades ago during the era of Tanzania's president and
> founder, Julius Nyerere, the pumps are creaky now, and thanks to a grant
> from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) new ones are being
> installed. It's a star attraction for USAID's Feed the Future program.
> According to the local officials who run it, the American help will rebuild
> the pumps, pave an access road, and rehabilitate the drainage canal that
> supplies the network of rice farms in the complex. In addition, USAID has
> put in place a model farm that teaches members of the coop the best
> practices in rice farming. A phalanx of women farmers greet us as we arrive
> at the model farm, singing and clapping and performing a series of original
> songs they've prepared for the occasion, and one of them, Victoria, with
> tears in her eyes, describes a litany of gains she's been able to achieve
> as a member of the relatively prosperous coop, with USAID's assistance.
>
> Problem is, for the rest of the 2 million people in and around the area,
> things are bleak.
>
> A drought, worsened by climate change and rising temperatures, has wracked
> the region. When I asked George Iranga, who manages the project, what
> happens to the farmers outside the coop, who don't have access to
> irrigation, he says that they are struggling. That's an understatement.
> Iranga says that the government in Dar es Salaam would like to replicate
> the gains in Uwawakuda elsewhere, but there's no money. "Our government is
> doing its best to look for funding, or supply it from its own resources,"
> he says. Mtaka, the district commissioner, himself is a farmer, and last
> year he lost a great deal of money on his own farm. "We have year-round
> rivers here, but there is no way to get the water to the farmers. What we
> need most of all is irrigation technology here. If the rain doesn't come,
> the farmers collapse financially." The districts have sixteen irrigation
> plans on the books, and no way to fund any of them.
>
> Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just
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>
> "The demand is too high," says Iranga. "The government will allocate each
> year small bits of what's needed." Of course, it falls far short.
>
> Back in Washington, USAID points to prgrams like Uwawakuda as success
> stories, and indeed they are. But compared to the staggering needs of a
> nation such as Tanzania—and multiply that by dozens of other counties
> across the globe—it's a drop in the bucket.
>
> Representative John Garamendi, a California Democrat with long experience
> in Africa, was part of the group visiting Tanzania organized by CARE. He
> says that while military-related foreign assistance is popular in Congress,
> humanitarian and development aid is more difficult to build support for,
> especially in the era of sequestration and budget cuts. "It'll be a
> challenge," he says. And while he supports the idea of increasing aid, he
> recognizes that it's a uphill climb.
>
> Still, says Garamendi, "It's easier to prevent a war or a failed state or a
> humanitarian crisis than it is to deal with one that's fully born. It is in
> America's interest to prevent failed states and wars and humanitarian
> crises."
>
> Tanzania, he says, has made substantial progress. "But there's a huge
> need." The United States, along with the rest of the developed world,
> through the so-called G-8, provide development and humanitarian aid, help
> build Tanzania's roads, water systems and infrastructure, facilitate direct
> forieign investment, and more, he says.
>
> Still, in the current Washington political climate, there's little or no
> chance that Tanzania will see a substantial increase in US foreign aid
> anytime soon. Although the United States has committed to supplying 0.70
> percent of its GNP in total foreign assistance, the current actual figure
> is a dismal 0.17 percent, less than one-fourth of what ought to be. Until
> that changes, the two million farmers around Morogoro will have to deal
> with drought, climate change and many other problems that plague them—and
> that condemn Tanzania to stagnation, with more than a third of its
> population living on fifty-eight cents a day—pretty much on their own.
>
> *In his previous post from Tanzania, Robert Dreyfuss wrote about getting
> more
> bang for the foreign aid
> buck<http://www.thenation.com/blog/173002/letter-tanzania-iii-using-afghan-peace-dividend>
> .*
>
> *http://www.thenation.com/blog/173078/letter-tanzania-iv-visit-morogoro#*
>
> --
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