TANZANIA: ICT boost income for rural communities amid hostile policies

By Aloyce Menda of JUSTA-AFRICA


Much have been said about how the Information and Communication technologies (ICT) can be used to reduce poverty, improve lives and empower people. However, in Africa where majority of population is rural, the problem remains on how modern ICT such as mobile phones, computers and the Internet can effectively enhance the livelihood of small-scale farmers who form the spine of most African economies.

With a population of 34.6 million, Tanzania resembles most developing countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa that suffers from economic problems due to rampant rural poverty and poor performance of agricultural sector. Proper application of modern technologies, like biotechnology and ICT, can rapidly reduce these problems, says the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its 2001 Human Development Report (HDR).

However, some new technologies particularly biotechnology should be applied with great care, cautioned the UNDP emphasizing that risks accompanied by new technologies need to be assessed case by case.

Though the idea existed since 1999, the founders of the Crop Marketing Bureau (CROMABU) in Tanzania premeditated the UNDP 2001 HDR and in September of the same year designed a project to gather and disseminate relevant information regarding crop prices in local and international markets. Basically the project [www.cromabu.com] is aimed at empowering small-scale farmers economically by enhancing their access to price information and insights in trade flows.

Apart from motivation by the UNDP report, the project was established to respond to demands for alternative options after government withdraw from direct involvement in crop marketing and production in rural areas. Tanzania like many past socialist states embarked in economic reforms from 1990s that paved the way for cooperation with international donors particularly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The international donor community imposed conditions for credit facilities. Among these is liberalization of markets and structural adjustments.

The central and local governments loosen their control on micro- economy to concentrate on macro-economic management and hence allowing the prices of farm inputs, produce and livestock to fluctuate freely. These reforms had to deal with an apparent real exchange rate appreciation that is partly associated with the reduction in real producer prices of main export and food crops. It helped in reducing inflation rates and as a result the costs of inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides increases while the costs of most agricultural products decreases. This means peasant farmers with few assets are at risky of falling deeper into poverty, resulting in low agricultural production.

Another effect of the reforms is that small-scale farmers are unable to compete with large-scale agricultural operations and powerful importers. Moreover, what seems to draw serious concern from the rural producers’ position is the modus operandi and stability of the rural institutions as they grow out of the reforms. State monopolies that covered retail and wholesale trade, agricultural marketing (state marketing authorities and co-operatives) have been exposed to unfair market competition.

Meanwhile, the marketing of agricultural produce, extension, supply of inputs, input subsidies, and pricing continue to fluctuate. Local markets for traditional cash and food crops, livestock and other farm by-products are few and although private operators (including middlemen or madalali in Kiswahili) are able to enter this new market system, most are too profit-minded and careless about producers’ poverty plight.

Deemed as the spine of the economy since independence from Britain in 1961, the agricultural sector is poorly performing and its current contribution to GDP is only 50 per cent though it employs over 70 per cent of labour force in Tanzania. According to government statistics, an overall, real agricultural GDP has been growing at an average rate of only about 3.5 per cent per annum since 1981. The current crop marketing system does not guarantee enough returns to complement production costs and hence discourages small-scale farmers who constitutes the bulk of producers in this sector. Even the few large-commercial farmers are discouraged by agriculture and trade policies.

The Ministry of Agriculture said in March 2001 during the national agricultural conference, that the sector faces a multitude of problems, which hamper its rapid growth. According to the ministry, the problems includes low priority accorded to agriculture in public resources allocation and disbursement; poor rural infrastructure; farmers’ limited capital and access to credit; inadequate support services; weak and inappropriate legal framework; land tenure and tax policy.

Covering 937,062 square kilometers of country size, Tanzania has a huge potential for agriculture with an estimated 43 million hectares suitable for farming. However, only an average of 6.3 million hectares are cultivated annually mostly by small-scale farmers. Large-scale commercial farms account for less than four per cent of all farms in Tanzania.

While stakeholders in agricultural sector are demanding the government to ensure a fair-competition policy, for agricultural marketing and distribution, CROMABU is leveling the ground by use of modern ICT to empower farmers.

Based in Magu area of Mwanza near to the southern shores of Lake Victoria, the four-year old CROMABU project is supported by the Dutch International Institute for Communication Development (IICD). It is steered by a board of directors composed of local and foreign ICT experts and businesspersons. It is managed by Mrs. Naomi Massele, a professional agriculturalist with experience in management of rural agricultural and industrial projects. The manager is answerable to the board of directors.

According to Mrs. Massele, CROMABU comprises three components. These are the Internet Café that serves the targeted community; the price information services; and community development through information and training. She said 16 villages are the main targets of the project though the information circulates further.

The youth, particularly primary and secondary school leavers are employed as a channel of communication between CROMABU and the targeted small-scale farmers in Magu. Information on crop prices gathered from local markets and prices of foreign markets downloaded from the Internet sources are compiled by CROMABU and stored in a database.

Eventually a simple price index is prepared in Ki-Swahili language and disseminated to farming villages. CROMABU distributes market statements with price index regularly. The youth take them to targeted villages using bicycles provided by the project.

Another communication method used is through the CROMABU community-training center for peasant farmers and youth groups. The youth trained by this center are charged fees but could pay part of it thorough temporary employment by collecting data from the local markets. They are also engaged in information dissemination to farmers.

The CROMABU’s development phase will end in September 2006 and is regarded by IICD as a pilot project to be replicated in other rural areas with crop marketing problems.

Poverty remains the greatest problem in Tanzania like most countries of the sub-Saharan region. Most of these countries face huge external debts and their social services are weak. More than half of 49 Least Developing Countries (LCD) are in Africa and like Tanzania most have formulated Poverty Reduction Strategic Papers (PRSP) to please donors and get aid.

Currently, the World Bank supports 25 active projects with commitments of US$1.7 billion in all major sectors in Tanzania.
Despite these efforts, Tanzania is still poor with a per capita income of about US$290. Nevertheless, according to the World Bank and other development partners, the government's firm commitment to poverty reduction, led to a couple of development results, which brought the country closer to reaching the Millennium Development Goals:

• Net enrollment rates for primary schooling increased from 58.8 percent in 2000 to 88.5 percent in 2003.
• Female literacy increased from 58.9 percent in 1995 to 69.2 percent in 2002 (male literacy increased from 85 percent to 90 percent over the same period).
• The percentage of the population with improved access to water increased from 32 percent in 1990 to 58.3 percent in 2003 (68 percent in urban areas and 48.5 percent in rural areas).
• The results of a household budget survey released in 2002 indicate that basic needs poverty has declined during the past decade from 39 percent to 35 percent (with significant differences, however, between urban and rural areas).

Today, UNDP, IMF, the World Bank and most of international donor agencies believe what the UN says. And that is: modern ICT can help poor countries fight poverty. But the question is how can ICT be used effectively to reduce poverty?

Before thinking of ICT project one should comprehend the multi-dimensional concept of poverty. Beyond a lack of income, poverty also refers to disadvantages in access to land, credit and services (such as health and education), vulnerability (towards violence, external economic shocks, natural disasters, powerlessness and social exclusion.

According to the year 2002/03 government commissioned study titled; Tanzania Participatory Poverty Assessment (TzPPA), impoverishing forces arise from social, economic and political processes. The study concludes that the macro-economic reforms that pushed the government to withdraw from running production and market operations is among impoverishing forces. This has affected rural population in three main areas namely: changes in marketing systems; lack of price control; and inadequate extension services.

Since modern ICT facilitates efficient creation, storage, management and dissemination of information by electronic means, they are powerful tools for fighting some of these impoverishing forces. If a peasant can send a 40-page trade document from Tanzania to Cuba for just 40 cents of one US$ (Tsh 400) instead of paying US$ 50 (Tsh 50,000) to courier, then there is no doubt that modern ICT are cost-effective and hence efficient in poverty reduction.

According to experts, four characteristics describes the powers of modern ICT in poverty reduction:
• Interactivity: For the first time ICT are effective two-way communication technologies.
• Permanent Availability: the new ICT are available 24 hours a day.
• Global reach: Geographic distances hardly matter any more.
• Cost-effective: For most areas the relative cost of communication have been shrunk to a fraction of previous values.

The CROMABU project is aimed at doing exactly that. With NGO set-up, the project generates income from its community-training center for peasant farmers and youth groups. It also charges fees from institutional clients in Magu such as NGOs for training and the Internet Café.

Small-scale farmers have benefited a lot from the project. The Internet services have helped them get best markets for their produce namely cotton, groundnuts, maize, beans, finger-millet and sunflower. When prices are low in Tanzania, the Internet enables them to secure direct buyers from aboard some of whom are sometimes ready to pay above the world market price.

Recent Press reports said that small cotton farmers in the neighbouring Bunda district situated about 450 kilometres from Magu in eastern shores of Lake Victoria refused to vend their products for shillings 180 (US$ 0.18) per kilogramme to any buyer. They heard that prices are much better in Magu and hence would rather retain their cotton, which after all is imperishable product. They anticipate buyers with good prices would eventually come!

Another example of a simple ICT project that propels rural development in Tanzania is that of Wino locality in southern highlands of Tanzania. There is no a telephone or power pole in sight, not even a satellite dish, but the people in Wino locality are capable of sending and receiving e-mails from all over the world. These people have ICT project that applies old fashion short wave radio.

A data modem and a laptop allow a classic 'codan' radio transceiver to send binary files through robust error-checking protocols to a receiving station, Bush link, where the file is put out on the Internet. Bushlink is one of two commercial providers in Tanzania, offering publicly accessible radio e-mail networks to many locations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Wino Development Association (WIDA), Wino Savings and Credit Co-operative Society (SACCO) and Wino Agricultural Marketing Co-operative Society (WAMCS) have used effectively the e-mail services since February 2002. The source of the energy for the equipment is a 50w solar panel and two 12 volts batteries.

The e-mail services have helped WAMCS search for best markets for Wino farmers' produce namely coffee, groundnuts, maize, beans, finger-millet, sunflower and timber. When coffee price was low in Tanzania, the e-mail system allowed WAMCS to secure a buyer through a Fair Trade Coffee Register, who was prepared to pay above the world market price.

The Wino ICT project is supported by SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency). SIDA has received a request to look into a scaling up of this project by promoting, attracting and training rural entrepreneurs to run such low-cost projects.

However, despite remarkable successes of WINO and CROMABU, the challenge remains on content issue. Most web contents are in English, which is a language of elite in Tanzania. Currently, about 70 per cent of all Internet content is in English and only 12 languages out of the world’s 6,000 or so accounts for about 98 per cent of the total web content. Ki-Swahili language, which constitutes over 80 per cent of the local media and public information contents in Tanzania, is not among the 12 languages. In other words, Ki-Swahili is among more than 5,900 world languages, which constitutes only two (02) per cent of the Internet content. Ki-Swahili is the official national language of 122 tribes of Tanzania, and over 95 percent of the population can only speak, read and write in either Ki-Swahili or tribal languages and hence can not comprehend most of the contents in the Internet even if the get access to it.

ICT projects in Tanzania faces the common problem of low capacity and costly Internet connectivity. Today the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) has licensed less than a dozen companies to provide public data communication services including Internet bandwidth.

According to the current National Information and Communications Policy of Tanzania, these data operators have isolated initiatives of connecting their Points-of-Presence (PoPs) to the global Internet backbone. As a result, Tanzania lacks cheaper and high capacity connections to the global Internet. “All connections, regardless of data service provider are small capacity international links that connect to the global Internet back-bone in different countries such as Norway and the United States,” says the policy.
ENDS
Aloyce Menda is the coordinator of JUSTA-AFRICA
[ http://www.comminit.com/experiences/pds122004/experiences-2850.html ]

& The second price winner of the UNECA / AISI Media Award 2004
[Www.uneca.org/aisi/ma04winners.htm OR www.uneca.org/aisi/ma04quotes.htm]

E-mail: [email protected]

Posted By: ALOYCE MENDA