Amizade - It means Friendship

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When I first met Peter Lazarus he could barely communicate in English. That was three years ago. Sunday he showed me the room in which he keeps the materials for his screen printing business. He explained how he found clients, where he got t-shirts, how he created stencils or drawings, where he did printing, and how he was hoping to expand.

My first interactions with Lazaro, some call him Laz, came during a course a taught in the summer of 2007. He quickly won over the students with a broad and enthusiastic smile, a warm personality, and a clear, compelling, and keen interest in the world and learning more about it. He practiced English with anyone willing. He took us on hikes around Kayanga. He began to speak of his interests and dreams – he wanted to have more schooling on art and design so that he could open his own sign-making and screen printing shop. Now he has.

His shop developed through a great deal of his own fortitude, the kind donations of some former Amizade students, and now the proceeds of his initial clients are helping him move forward. He visits schools, shows him the t-shirts he can make, and gets their preferred design. He then writes out the letters for the school name and draws the school crest by hand. After these things are done, he uses great care with the finest point of a utility knife to cut out stencils for the words and the crest. From these stencils he then prints the shirts. He can get some shirts six miles away in Omurushaka, but if he has a large order or wants high quality t-shirts he must do business an hour and a half away in Bukoba or sometimes across Lake Victoria (one night’s ferry ride) in Mwanza. The finished t-shirts sell for about 5000 Tanzanian shillings each, or a little more than $4.00 US.

Laz is still smiling, still working hard, and still focusing on the future. He wears the same clothes all the time, must do all of his work out of a shared room about eight feet by four feet wide, and walks daily through the poverty-riddled and dust-chocked streets of his hometown Kayanga. Lesser souls would quit, but he is soaring. His newest business initiative is directly related to his current work. He is trying to find the funding or donations to buy a laser printer and a digital camera. With these tools he’ll take orders for photos from the kids in the schools he’s working with. All students who make it to secondary school want a school photo, and he has his eye on that market.

The life expectancy here in Tanzania is still less than fifty. Nearly two-thirds of people don’t have access to water in their homes (Laz doesn’t). These conditions make opportunity rare, and initiative and innovation difficult to imagine. People like Peter Lazarus triumph with the assistance of some small help and donations. People like Joseph Sekiku demonstrate the empowering quality of a good education and clear conscience. Organizations like Amizade support the good works of community organizations like FADECO and WOMEDA, and organizations like Amizade help form the relationships that promote friendships across cultures and can be deeply enabling for people like Laz.

I’ve reconnected with two old friends here in Kayanga, Tanzania. Together, they’ve reminded me why we’re here and shown me (again) the strength of local growth and innovation. Most people have missed it, but the vast majority of Africa has actually experienced steady growth over the past decade. That’s particularly true if you remove the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan from the analysis. Two friends here exemplify this trend.

Joseph Sekiku is the director and co-founder of FADECO, the Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation. Since FADECO’s founding in 1993, he has identified challenges, innovated, struggled, gathered scarce resources, and developed countless solutions. A few years ago, he received one of the highest global honors for social entrepreneurship when he was named an Ashoka fellow. Over the past four years, we’ve been privileged to help support some of his efforts, through some funding and through some direct labor.

In the early 90s he realized his region wasn’t food self-sufficient. He educated landholders on sustainable farming techniques. Output exploded. Suddenly they needed markets. He helped develop a solar fruit-drying program to ensure goods had greater chances of getting the whole way to a market without spoiling. He realized sharing information was key to development, so he developed a newsletter for farmers. Then he figured out how to devise a satellite connection to get internet access to the region. Suddenly, people had information access – and soon additional internet cafes followed. He saw other NGOs were spending large amounts on educating community members, so he developed a radio station through innovation and accepting some donations. He built his first transmitter and rigged together the first radio tower out of sections of rebar. These local radio broadcasts - used to educate people on farming practices, positive water usage and hygiene habits, women’s rights, and health concerns – are now heard by more than four million people, extending well beyond the immediate Karagwe region.

Joseph is keen on preventative and proactive efforts in community development. He applauds the US Government for its recent emphasis on providing treated anti-malarial bed nets and placing an emphasis on indoor spraying in homes. These practices, in his mind, are far superior to providing drugs or healthcare only after people have contracted malaria. In the region this year, the number of malaria cases dropped from previous years.
Joseph achieves all of this through a unique set of gifts and circumstances and also by being consistently innovative with the scarce resources he has. His family was originally from this region. His father was the region’s only doctor, but in Joseph’s youth they lived in Uganda. At the time, the schools were substantially better there. Joseph focused on his studies until he had a university degree in agriculture sciences, which he thought would give him more opportunity to help than a medical degree like his father’s.

Joseph’s biggest obstacle through the years – he says – has been community members and visitors who don’t believe improvement is possible. He recalls pointing toward bare hills that could be forested, declaring that fruits could be dried and sold, and beginning to build a radio tower – all to the sound of laughter and disbelief. Like any innovator, he has been forced to hold steady in his commitments and efforts despite the gathering community condescension.

Fortunately for Joseph and for the region of Karagwe, this area has seen steady growth. Joseph has had the chance to not only see the success of the efforts he spearheaded, but he has also seen the number of secondary schools, in just two decades, go from three to nearly forty. During the four years I’ve been visiting the area, cell phone networks have appeared and become consistent and reliable, a water system has been installed in town (36% of people in the region now have access to water), an ATM machine has been installed at the bank, and – thanks to Joseph and others – local radio is available and multiple internet access points are possible. The harbinger of things to come: my friend Deo loaned me a Vodafone Tanzania wireless access point for my computer, meaning I should be able to pick up internet wherever there’s a cell signal. The signals aren’t consistently quite strong enough yet, but – next year.

And another friend, Peter Lazarus, is an inspiring innovator of another sort. Three years ago he had less than nothing, but a clear will to succeed and ideas for a business. Through work, smooth talk, innovation and serious effort, he’s now a very small business owner in town. Of course, he has ideas for growth. More about him – I call him Lazaro – next time.

We’re bound for Kayanga, Tanzania: departing Pittsburgh for Altanta, then Amsterdam, and finally Uganda’s Entebbe airport before 8 hours over road to our rural village destination. As is the case with all Amizade experiences, we go in search of a solution. The solutions we seek are partly informed through service and somewhat illuminated through learning. On this program the service includes working with a sustainable development organization, Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation (FADECO), as well as a women’s rights organization, the Women’s Emancipation and Development Agency (WOMEDA). These local organizations have already created a set of beautiful solutions for the issues they address. We simply work to support their efforts.

In a region where 25% of the local crops were spoiling before reaching the market, FADECO developed a set of value-added post-production processes, drawing on simple and affordable local materials. Regional farmers now also sell dried fruits. Tomatoes are shipped as far away as Sweden, where pizza shops can advertise Tanzania sun-dried tomatoes among their toppings. FADECO was central to educating and empowering farmers about these possibilities, and also central to bringing internet and radio to the region. As FADECO’s Director and co-founder Joseph Sekiku so clearly knows, education and information are central to success.

WOMEDA, simultaneously, has worked to ensure women are afforded the most basic legal protections and rights. Within recent generations, the situation in respect to women’s rights in this region was so poor that effectively one half of the population was not allowed to learn, to grow, or to meet its potential. Still today, women frequently farm, take care of the children, fetch water, harvest the crops, and sell the crops, only to be forced – at the threat or eventuality of abuse – to turn any small proceeds over to their husbands. The husbands frequently use the money to drink, to leave briefly, to do anything but support their families. In this context WOMEDA helps ensure young women have the right to schooling, women have the right to hold property, and – in the case of any disputes – women are permitted legal standing in court. WOMEDA advances basic respect and rights for women.

It is these organizations that create the solutions. We support them by helping a breadth of efforts: English language tutoring, grant-writing, English writing and brochure development, conducting interviews with local women as part of creating a base-line survey, and assisting with the installation of gravity-based water harvesting systems to help ensure more families have water access. We do these things and more, always at the direction of our local partners. Yet we still search.

While in many ways FADECO and WOMEDA help us identify and implement some solutions, the scale of the challenges here is so great and the immediacy of the issues so overwhelming, that our work with them really only catalyzes our efforts to better understand. This program is part of a course offered through West Virginia University. The course focuses on International Development. We therefore read from and review many of the important, frequently oppositional, voices in the field such as Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs and New York University’s William Easterly. While Sachs writes with contagious optimism and suggests we have the power to end poverty in our time, Easterly heaps a similarly persuasive scathing disdain on people like Sachs. Easterly is appalled anyone might think poverty will be rendered obsolete through careful planning and guidance from above; he insists relief will come only through individual ingenuity and drive, and that there is no reasonable place for Sachs’ initiatives such as the Millennium Villages.

My students and I drop into the thick of this debate, but unlike many students or established economists (Easterly and Sachs both), we will consider these questions in the context of their application. We will dialogue with local people about the solutions they develop, the challenges they see, and the perspective they have. We will, no doubt, see kernels of truth and fallacy in both Sachs’ and Easterly’s approaches, as we cede the easy approach of aligning ourselves with one or another theory in favor of the much more challenging effort to better understand development as it works, in real life, on the ground.

But first – across the Atlantic, into Europe, over the Mediterranean, witnessing the desiccate brown of the Sahara distant below, and flying over increasingly lush and verdant Africa before touching down in what Winston Churchill called the Pearl of Africa - Uganda.