‘Youth is the key' - development in Tanzania

by Derek Thorne

Of all of the things I helped to do while working on a development project in the rural Tanzanian village of Kilala Kidewa , one of the more bizarre was supervising the purchase of the first turkeys ever to come to the village. I'll bet they were almost as overwhelmed to arrive as I was.

In 2001, I spent four months as a volunteer with the Tanzanian branch of the charity Students Partnership Worldwide (SPW). It was, without doubt, the most remarkable four months of my life so far. SPW organises youth-based development projects in a number of countries, and in Tanzania , one of the projects involves sending groups of four or five young people to villages in a beautiful region named the Southern highlands.

With SPW, the key is the partnerships. All of the groups are a mixture of ‘local' volunteers and volunteers from overseas countries such as the UK and Australia . And if the partnerships are the key, then the ones to turn that key are the youth. It's merely stating the obvious that the future of the world lies in the hands of the young, but it was only in the village that I realised that there is so much more out there for the young to learn, and for the young to do. I've become convinced that there's an enthusiasm, a real veracity for learning and new experiences that is shared by youth the world over.

And so, when I arrived in the unbelievably calm setting of Kilala Kidewa, just after completing four weeks of training in health and conservation techniques, I was with a Briton and two Tanzanians, all of us no older than 22.

It was a curious moment. After a four hour journey, we stepped off the bus – possibly the most surreal bus in all of Africa , by the way, on account of dashboard stickers like “Jesus: coming soon” – to a view of a fantastic, cloud-topped mountain on one side, and our new house on the other. Mud walls, and a sheet of corrugated iron on top – this, indeed, was our home.

And Kilala Kidewa became a good home for us. The idea of SPW projects is to do everything “bottom-up” – although we volunteers had a specific aim of starting environmental development projects, the control was not meant to rest with us, but with the people of the village. Hence, we spent the first month trying to integrate and find out what people's environmental concerns were, be it farming, firewood, or unhealthy water.

Following that, we did our best to help the villagers out. A longstanding buzzword in development is ‘sustainability', and long may it remain – we had much more success with low-cost projects, like building composts, simply because the resources (green plants, ash, and a hefty amount of cow manure) would always be there. And it's not just about financial sustainability – if we taught anything, we tried to do it with a native of the village, to ensure the knowledge stayed around for a while longer after we left.

And, oddly enough, those turkeys were also part of a sustainable project. Many of the young people in the village were keen to start businesses, and although we weren't much of a bank, we had a bit of money to spend on start-up costs. As in any project, low-cost and long-term remained the (hyphenated) watchwords, and the youth of the village eventually agreed that if we helped a few businesses to get off their feet, these would in turn help a few new ones to start, once the profits started coming in.

For some reason, the idea of breeding pigs was the most popular. But one group didn't succumb to the estimable appeal of pork, and expressed their interest in turkeys instead. Why? It seems the white, ex-patriate population of Tanzania are very willing to pay good prices for a turkey at Christmas – alas, even in East Africa , the humble turkey is not safe.

I have nothing against animals, of course, but there's another set of creatures that (I hope) are becoming endangered in Kilala Kidewa: that is, crop pests. Another problem highlighted by villagers was the dear price of chemical fertilisers, which they needed to repel troublesome insects. This was probably not helped by the fact that many pesticides in Tanzania do not come with Swahili instructions – which, combined with that universal urge to “add a little bit more, just to be safe”, resulted in what you might call “chemical overkill”.

But luckily, we managed to work with the local Bwana Shamba (a farming guru, whose title literally means ‘Mr Farm') in teaching a recipe for an organic pesticide. Did you know that boiled chilli peppers and soap can protect maize for a week? Neither did I, but when farmers started appearing at our door to show off the dead insects they'd just found, I knew we were getting somewhere.

In the end, despite Kilala Kidewa being a brilliant and unique place to live, I felt I'd be happy to depart, simply because I wanted to let the village community get on with their own projects. But, well, there's always that fear that people will forget you; or, more precisely, that they will forget what you stood for in the first place. How can you get around that?

A group of SPW volunteers in a nearby village had the brilliant idea that we should organise an annual event – something to bring communities together, to have fun, and perhaps, to talk about development. The choice of event was obvious: it had to be a football match. So nowadays, every February, the two titans take each other on: Kilala Kidewa vs. nearby Uhominyi.

Okay, it's not quite the Old Firm Derby, but football always amazes me: wherever it's played, it has the ability to bring people together, and then to make them go absolutely mental. It didn't matter that the match was on the most undulating of pitches – I'm sure the ball could actually roll from the penalty spot into the goal by itself – or that the existence of the pitch markings was in serious doubt. Nothing could quell the crowd. When a mere disallowed goal was scored, there was a pitch invasion, and when a genuine goal went in, it was outright chaos.

I still recall the moment when, as Kilala Kidewa scored, everyone around me on the touchline suddenly stormed onto the pitch – leaving me stood on the touchline, feeling slightly bemused. I managed to run on after them, of course. Perhaps that's how they remember me - I seem to recall feeling bemused very often.

Development work turned out to be hard, fun, fulfilling, and immensely thought provoking. I still can't answer questions like: How do you measure ‘development'? How can the earth support us all? And how can anyone drink that local brew? I think I'm still as overwhelmed as the turkey.