Banúlacht Exchange 2007: Visit with the Mwanza Rural Housing Programme

Two days of the Exchange were spent Mwanza, near Lake Victoria, where our programme was organised by Maimuna Kanyamala of Kivulini Women's Rights Organisation. We split into pairs and spent a day with four different organisations in and around Mwanza. Niamh Farren of Aontas and Maeve Taylor from Banúlacht spent the day with Mrs Ashiliya E Nyanda , manager of Mwanza Rural Housing Programme (MRHP) a grass roots NGO with 400 members working in five districts of the Mwanza region. We spent time with Ashililya getting to know about MRHP, and also visited Luboga Village for a meeting of a local credit scheme (see more on MHRP below).


Luboga Village

A group of women we visited in Luboga Village, near Mwanza, northern Tanzania. The women are Sukuma, i.e. members of the largest ethnic group in Tanzania. Held in a small church, the meeting was attended mostly by women, with many older women present. Ashiliya explained that ten or fifteen years ago, women would not have participated in meetings like this.


Traditionally Sukuma women kneel down to serve food to men (husbands, brothers, or sons). However, the reality is more complex: we met Sukuma women who preserve the tradition of kneeling out of respect to their parents and grandparents of both sexes, but not to their husbands or younger men.

Luboga village meeting
Short video (90 seconds) The chorus of the song is 'Si Mama' or 'Women stand up'. Singing became a very important part of the Exchange-here the Tanzanian group are singing for us; when the whole Irish group was together, under the leadership of Breda Murphy, we ended our meetings with the Rita Connolly song, Ripples in the Rockpool, which was very well received, although with great hilarity in Zanzibar!.


Mwanza Rural Housing Programme
In 2006 Mwanza Rural Housing Programme was a winner of the Ashden Awards, an annual competition to identify and reward organisations which have carried out truly excellent, practical, yet innovative schemes, demonstrating sustainable energy in action at a local level. The article below is taken from the website of the Ashden Awards.

Mwanza Rural Housing Programme (MRHP), Tanzania
Sustainable brick-firing technology leads to thousands of new homes for the people of Mwanza: an innovative brick-firing technology uses rice husks, cotton waste and coffee husks instead of wood to fire bricks for house building. This technology has led to the construction of 100,000 new homes for the people of Mwanza whilst at the same time saving an estimated 1,500 kilo-tonnes of wood in five years.

Mwanza countryside

Mwanza is situated on the southern shores of Africa’s largest lake, Lake Victoria, yet there are parts of the region that are far from lush - rather they are semi-arid and dry with a high incidence of poverty. The quality of housing in the area is extremely poor with the majority of people living in semi-permanent mud structures that are vulnerable to storms and earth tremors.

MRHP, who have been working in the area for 15 years, saw the urgent need to find a way to improve the quality of housing in the region without causing further damage to the environment. Bricks were already being manufactured using wood to fire the kilns. In an area already severely deforested, this was causing huge problems, not to mention the fact that 100 year old mango trees were being cut down to produce wood for brick-firing.

MRHP began looking for a sustainable method of firing bricks for house building that would also be cost effective. The result was a brick-firing kiln capable of producing good quality bricks that does not burn a single tree. Instead it uses widely available agro waste including cotton waste, rice husks, coffee husks and in some cases sawdust to fire the kiln.
Ashiliya Nyanda with one of the new technology kilns

To date MRHP has helped villagers to set up sustainable brick-making businesses by providing training and loans to build 50 kilns in various villages and one large permanent kiln. Together they have produced enough bricks to build an impressive 100,000 homes (1,500 in each of the 70 villages involved in the scheme). The quality of the bricks is also high enough for them to have been adopted for use in a 3,000 house-building programme by one of Tanzania’s largest pension funds (the Parastatal Pensioners Fund).

Not only has this project radically improved the quality of housing for 50% of the region’s inhabitants, who no longer have to regularly re-build their homes, it has also regenerated the region by employing several hundred largely unskilled youths in brick-making. In fact, right from the start the project was developed as a means of setting up local businesses with dozens of young men trained to use the technology and given loans to help them start up. There is now a thriving local industry in the area that has lifted people out of poverty and fostered a genuine entrepreneurial spirit that is spreading throughout the region.

Houses built from the improved bricks in Mwanza
All aspects of the supply chain have been involved. Rice millers, for example, were persuaded by MRHP to use new machinery imported from China to produce better quality husks. The husks have since gained value and the millers have found an excellent outlet for this previously unmanageable waste product.

MRHP’s efforts have not stopped there. Working together with local communities, the project has also established wood lots to increase forest cover in the region and designed and developed an energy saving stove made using local clays. Hundreds of women have been trained to produce and maintain the stoves and to date 14,000 have been installed. The stoves are cheap, and save more than 50% of fuel wood, compared to the conventional stove.

In the words of the producers…

“I have only been working as a brick maker for one year. With the loan from MHRP I have already made 60,000 bricks and this allows me to repay my loan and live comfortably. Next year I plan to double my production” Brick maker

“The women used to feel inferior, now they have come up, you often see women riding their own bicycle.” Project worker on the MRHP’s women’s programme.

“At the age of 28 I am now well established in the community. All my children can go to secondary school, when I myself did not even go to primary.” Brick maker

“Before, i used to spend so much of my time rebuilding my mud home. I was very fed up. Now that I have a well built home made of bricks, I don't have to worry about rebuilding it again and again. I can relax and enjoy my home.” Mzee Isangu,
Missungwi District, Tanzania.

Banúlacht Exchange 2007

Banúlacht’s two-week visit to Tanzania in September 2007 was the culmination of a long process of relationship-building, which began in 2004, and intensive planning and organisation throughout 2007. Eight women: Sarah Beth Watkins-Templeshannon CDP, Co Wexford; Aoife Cooke–Tallaght Intercultural Action; Jo Lambe-Open Door Network, Tralee; Sarah Oates-Tuam CDP; Niamh Farren-Aontas; Breda Murphy-Waterford Women’s Centre; Eileen Smith and Maeve Taylor (Banúlacht) travelled to Tanzania. During our visit we spent time in Dar Es Salaam, Mwanza and Zanzibar, where we met with women’s groups and organisations working on gender equality issues in a wide range of contexts, as well as exchange and dialogue with the Irish Embassy in Dar Es Salaam.

Exchange group with (centre) Anne Barrington, Irish Ambassador to Tanzania and Lucy Merere, Gender Consultant, and (back row) William Carlos, Head of Development.

The FEMACT/TGNP Gender Festival
We began and ended in Dar es Salaam, with our focus for the first few days being TGNP’s Gender Festival, a gathering of over 1,000 feminists, NGO workers, community organisations, government officials, media people, academics and grassroots activists.

TGNP staff and Board Members at the Gender Festival


Jo Lambe of the Open Door Network, Tralee with a delegate at the TGNP Gender Festival, September 2007.

The theme of the Gender Festival was: Gender, Democracy and Development: African Feminist Struggles in the Context of Globalization. Each of the four days had a specific theme: Day 1: Conceptualisation and focus for the festival; Day 2: African feminist struggle issues; Day 3; Putting patriarchy on trial; and Day 4: The way forward. Workshops began on the second day and continued until the last day of the festival. Themes were addressed through art, drama, song, as well as through presentations and discussion.


Large size posters being carried around the outdoor festival venue to generate discussion.

The workshop titles give a flavour of the scale, ambition and scope of the event:

The right to bodily integrity, sexuality, reproductive health and maternal health
The right to clean water for all: struggles over delivery and privatisation
Feminist struggles over natural resources
The politics of culture , unilateralism and the rise of fundamentalism
Leadership
Gender based violence and patriarchal culture
Struggles over equitable power sharing in all spheres of politics and decision-making
Feminist participatory organising and movement building
Feminist struggles over unfair trade and debt, and for an alternative global economy
Popular feminist life histories on women and struggle
Struggles over emancipatory education: language, information and the media
Gender and generation and struggles over HIV & AIDS
Feminist struggles against corruption and for increased accountability of government to its citizens, including gender budgeting
Care economy and struggles over unpaid labour, focusing on HIV & AIDS
Children’s workshop on feminist struggles and children’s rights

The Gender Festival was an eye-opener for the group in many ways. As Sarah-Beth Watkins explains: "We had an idea of the poverty and struggles African women face but the Gender Festival also showed us their strength. It was the group’s first experience of being in Tanzania and meeting with women working for women’s empowerment. Mary Rushimbi of TGNP said, ‘We are not all victims. We are very good doers. Yes, there is trouble in Africa but there is also organising.’
The women are strong and they are vocal. I watched as women grabbed the microphones to tell the audience that rural women demand an education, that women must be involved in the national economy, that combating patriarchy is a must, that women will no longer sit by and watch large transnational companies destroy their environment through the pillaging of Tanzania’s own natural resources – the list goes on but what shocked us even more was that men too were making these demands.

A young man stood up and told the crowd that he believed women to be an important part of society and that patriarchy must end. He was followed by a male university teacher who added that women can also be patriarchal and oppressive of their own gender. Women present agreed and also spoke of men suffering from patriarchy.
This was gender being discussed in a way that those of us who work in women-only spaces found challenging. Men were as vocal here as women. Did this put women and their issues in the shade? Or was there more of a balance here than we had expected? Was gender equality really working? It took a visit to rural Mwanza for us to realise that women were still being oppressed and abused. The balance was still far from being equal." More from Sarah-Beth's articles in later blogs.
Aoife Cooke browsing at the feminist market place.

Maeve Taylor and Sarah Beth Watkins with Fatma Alloo of the Tanzania Media Women's Association and Gemma Akilimali of TGNP