Operation Tech Start

Holly’s been hard at work for the last several weeks networking and getting our facilities in shape, including fixing up the gorgeous volunteer house. Adil and I (Jordan) spent the last week in Dar, taking basic Swahili classes at KIU and getting some cultural immersion in the city (including being practically buried in Kiswahili while riding the local public transport system, the Daladala — quite a crowded, if cheap, mode of transport!).

Lots of practice with greetings (incredibly important to get anything done here), do’s and don’ts, and work with essential verbs and phrases. Our instructor, Nicholas, was an amazing help, devoting the better part of every day that week to teaching us and taking us out into the city.

Saturday morning brought our departure from Dar and flight to Tabora — quite a dramatic change. We left the hustle and bustle of the crowded port city and landed in quite the pastoral land of green. Holly met us at the airport, and we caught a ride with one of the Alliance One drivers to the house to drop off our bags before heading into town. (Still working on getting the keys copied…)

Things definitely move at a different pace here in Tabora. Mornings are very busy, with meetings with all of the various forces we’re trying to somehow tie together, including the mobile phone companies here, Alliance One, and the kind volunteers and staff at HAPO, a school for orphans of HIV/AIDS at which we’re spending some time teaching computer classes. Then, lunch and the heat-of-the-day afternoon siesta, when things slow down significantly. Evenings tend to be very laid back, with dinner and then social time with the volunteers and the locals.

Our research, all couple days of it, has been going remarkably well. Meeting with mobile phone companies will hopefully yield data on distribution, usage, and options for making mass communication more affordable. What we theorized is showing itself to be pretty much true — while computers are still more or less prohibitively expensive, mobile phones have become incredibly popular over the last couple of years here, with a remarkably high rate of usage. If we can get our hands on some more concrete data, we can match that up with data from Alliance One regarding their farmers, and really get things going.

Communication with farmers now is difficult at best. Most communication between the company and the farmers is done via cooperatives called primary societies, which handle the distribution of inputs (fertilizers, seeds, etc.), education, and the sale of the harvested and cured tobacco. To get information from the company, farmers must travel as much as 8 or 10 hours by bicycle or, if they’re lucky, vehicle, not even knowing if what they need will be there when they arrive. They spend the night there, then must spend another day traveling back, sometimes emptyhanded. To get payment for their crop, farmers or their representatives from primary societies must make what can sometimes be a several-day trip to the banks in Tabora to get the cash in a lump sum. Carrying this much money is extremely dangerous, even in a place as peaceful as Tabora, and so they either hide the money all over their bodies and make a mad dash back home, or, as occurs more often, spend it all on sundry things here in town and then return home, as broke as when they arrived.

Obviously, these problems are pretty big ones, and so we are just beginning to explore possible solutions. The expanded use of mobile phones, combined with mass messaging services to distribute information on pricing, payment, planting, or other essentials, is one promising option. Another idea from Alliance One, to solve the issues of payment, is encouraging investment in things like cattle or other livestock, so that the farmer, rather than spending his money on unnecessary things, can make a long-term investment that can serve as a safety net in the event of a bad year for tobacco. Alliance One is already undertaking a project like this called the Oxen Project, wherein investments are made into oxen and carts to allow for increased efficiency with work in the fields and easier transportation of inputs from and tobacco to the primary societies. More info about this project will be forthcoming, as we’ll be going to check out the demonstration areas in the next few days.

However, these options rely heavily on motivating the farmers and educating them, so we still have a lot of footwork to do, speaking directly with them and finding out their needs firsthand. In the next few weeks, we’ll be visiting farmers at the tobacco markets throughout the Tabora region, interviewing them and finding out what kinds of information and services they need and what would be absolutely useless to them. Throwing useless technology at a problem rarely does anything but create rust heaps, but careful research and the concentrated use of certain technologies could dramatically improve the lives of these farmers in this beautiful part of Tanzania.

–Jordan