Let us learn from the Belgian NGO

By Editor

Editorial Cartoon

It is a well-known fact that most Tanzanians, in fact over 80 per cent of them, live in rural areas where they eke out a living through farming and running small scale enterprises.


However, most of the farmers cultivate just enough land to meet the food requirements of their families.

Reasons for them not striving to go up the economic ladder are many and varied, but the basic one is that they lack appropriate knowledge and capital.
Indeed the biggest challenge to speedy development that the country has been striving for lies in how to quickly get across the knowledge needed to galvanise the rural resources to eradicate poverty.

We know that there are efforts going on in rural areas around the country, and are happy to learn what is happening in Arusha and Manyara regions through a three-year project, organised by a Belgian-based non-governmental organisation called TRIAS.

The NGO has provided 10bn/- for the benefit of farmers and SMEs. Under the project thousands of them will undergo training on ways to increase returns on their investments.

An official of TRIAS, Antony Rottjers, said the NGO had embarked on the project in consideration of the fact that the power of local economy is the lever to improve welfare and a powerful weapon against poverty.

He couldn’t be more right, given the fact that this country’s economy is rural based, on whom the majority poor depend.

The Belgian NGO has chosen to start in the villages of these two regions whose people are reputed for growing wheat and vegetables, but are yet to do so, on a large, commercially beneficial scale.

It is our expectation that all stakeholders fighting poverty will closely monitor the project, quickly learn and transfer the relevant tips to other farming communities in the country in the overall effort to end poverty, which is holding down our rural population.

We indeed see this as a useful area that the many other NGOs working with rural people can join forces with TRIAS in those areas of complementarities, all aiming to alleviate debilitating poverty in Tanzania’s rural areas. This does not imply that we do not value the work of the many NGOs in our rural area. This is about leveraging capacity.

Doing so would also help to put a stop to the problem of rural-urban migration, affecting mostly young people who after primary and secondary education, tend to look down on rural chores, including farming.

Most of them dream of and struggle to get white collar jobs in urban areas. They therefore do not consider farming as having prospects for them.
They think that life is all milk and honey in urban areas, but once they get there they are disappointed to find that the jobs they believed would be easily available to them are just not there.

It is such young people that can benefit from services offered by the Belgian NGO and any of the others working in the rural areas.

That is why the initiative deserves the support of everybody in the country.
 

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN