The keys to sustainable development

Relationships and time, according to Andy Hart, are the two essential ingredients in a successful development project. So we learned today on our Geography class trip to Ismani village, located half an hour outside of Iringa on the tooth-rattling road to Dodoma. Andy, a British veterinarian and CMS missionary whose wife started Neema Crafts, took five students and me to see his development projects in the village, which include chicken vaccinations, cattle dip tanks, solar water disinfection, solar panel distribution, and most recently, bat farming.

Chicken vaccination is always the first project Andy implements in a new village. The average family in rural Tanzania usually keeps at least six or seven chickens, but is rarely able to increase that number because 60% of the chickens die every year from Newcastle disease (kideri in Kiswahili). For 2,800 Tsh, or about $2, Andy buys a vial of vaccine in Iringa and takes it to a village. There, he trains a local team to be vaccinators and community organizers. The team goes around to all the houses in the village and tells the families to keep their chickens inside that night; the next morning, the team comes to each house to catch and vaccinate the chickens.

Catching chickens, as anyone who grew up on a farm will know, involves diving behind chairs, under beds, and even climbing into cupboards. Once all the chickens have been vaccinated in this manner, the team has not only performed an invaluable veterinary service to the chickens, but they have (unbeknownst to the families) been able to assess the poverty level of each family in the village by looking for radios, lamps, water filters, and other possessions that indicate standard of living. If something troublesome catches their eye, they simply ask the family for a cup of tea, and then sit down to talk about it.

Once Andy chased a chicken into a grain silo and found a seven-year old child lying in the dark in a straw basket. The boy was born disabled so the family hid him away - common practice in a country with no social services and massive prejudice against disabled people. The neighbors didn’t even know the boy existed. Now, after two months of physical therapy, the boy is able to walk and will hopefully begin school soon. Contrast this with the highly paid mzungu who drives up in a shiny Land Rover to ask the families why they are so poor. Get it? Relationships. Catching chickens is everyday business, and villagers helping vaccinate chickens talk more honestly with each other than they ever would with an outsider with zero knowledge of their community.

The results of the vaccination program are astounding; many families see their chicken population quintuple within four to six months. Once these families have thirty or forty chickens running about the shamba, their children’s protein intake increases, which in turn improves their performance in school. Some families are inspired to entrepreneurialism, selling chickens for pigs, and pigs for cell phones and tin roofs that won’t leak during the rainy season.

Because of its quick, concrete results, the chicken vaccination program is the perfect way to gain villagers’ trust, and more importantly, for them to develop a new outlook on their own possibilities. With more money, a more comfortable home, and healthier children, villagers are much more inclined to listen to the next project Andy proposes, like cattle dip tanks, for example.

Cattle Dip Tanks

When Andy first started working in Ismani five years ago, the cattle dip tank that served the surrounding villages was falling apart. When the villagers came to him and asked how they could get a new one, he invited all the cattlemen to a meeting. Sixty four cattlemen showed up, and instead of being given a handout, Andy told them to go back to their villages and see if they could rustle up the materials – sand, bricks, wood, tin – to revitalize the dip tank. His only contribution was a few bags of cement from town. Three weeks later, the new dip tank was servicing 500 head of cattle per morning.

Now, the surrounding villages only lose three head of cattle per year, compared to 105 per year before the tank was renovated. Furthermore, the tank is making a handsome profit (about 200,000 Tsh per year) for the council of cattlemen elected by their peers to oversee it, and they are planning use this money to protect the spring from which everyone in the area gets their drinking water. My students and I crouched down at the spring, which is nothing more than a faint trickle, and tried to scoop up the water with our hands – no luck.

Andy explained to us that the cattle arrive first in the morning, drinking, urinating and defecating in the water, and then the villagers come to fill up their water jugs by using their hands or small spoons. One can imagine the extra hours of work this entails, not to mention the deadly diseases passed from home to home by this water. The council’s plan is to create three concrete tanks that will fill up overnight, so that the cattle can’t get to the spring in the morning and the people can simply turn the tap and fill their jugs in a matter of minutes.

The Tanzanian government, interestingly, has also launched a campaign to renovate dip tanks, but in contrast, they use 10 million Tsh - per tank. As much of that money goes to outside contractors and corrupt officials, I doubt there is any money for the local to reinvest in frivolities like protecting their drinking water.

SODIS: Solar Disinfection of Water

SODIS solar disinfection of water is perhaps the cheapest and easiest to implement of all Andy’s projects: fill a bottle with water, leave it in the sunshine for a few hours, the water heats up, the parasites die.

I’ll get to the specifics in a bit, because it’s a bit more complicated than this, but consider the fact that most African villagers use charcoal (which means they cut down all the trees in their shamba) to make their water safe for drinking. Now consider that more women and children die in Africa each year from smoke than from malaria. No, I don’t mean cigarette smoke (thankfully, this is one category in which Africans are world leaders) but smoke from cooking fires, which is inhaled at close range by women and children on a daily basis. One-week old babies, wrapped tightly against mother’s back as she stirs the evening meal, are powerless to stop the smoke from entering and destroying their tiny lungs. Respiratory systems are severely damaged, leading to an overall reduction in immune system efficiency and an ultimate death from flu or pneumonia.

Can these deaths really be prevented just by putting bottles out in the sun? Andy believes so, and so do the thousands of villagers in the Iringa region who he has helped to begin purifying their water by using SODIS technology. Ideally, the bottle should be between 1 and 2 liters in capacity, and should be placed on a strip of corrugated metal to help the water heat up faster and more thoroughly. This allows the water to reach 30 degress C, at which point all harmful parasites die. Two hours of direct, hot sunshine will do the trick, but six is better.

But where can the villagers get corrugated metal and plastic bottles? Half the mud huts in these villages are roofed with corrugated metal, so there are always scraps lying around, and there just so happens to be a spring water-bottling factory (Maji Afrika) not 30km outside Iringa. These bottles are usually chucked from bus windows (like the blue plastic bags that blight the gorgeous African landscape) or into burn piles where they leach their poisonous chemicals into the atmosphere one way or another. So instead of degrading the environment with these bottles, we can actually beautify the land and save people’s lives while we’re at it.

Andy has introduced this concept to dozens of local schools, ensuring that each child places a full bottle of water on the roof of the classroom in the morning, so that when school ends he or she can take a bottle of clean water home for the night. Anette and I have been using SODIS here at home in Iringa for several months now, and we would like to help students at all 23 of FORS’ schools in Idodi and Pawaga to do the same thing.