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

Banúlacht International Women's Day Conference 2007

Photos and comments from participants

"Banulacht International Women’s Day Conference was a great lift for me in my aspiration to the principal roots for justice, equality and education for all women. This conference really has given me the opportunity to see a diversity of women from grassroots, national and globally and how I and we work in harmony in so many different ways to highlight the reality of women lives."

Lebo Mashile, Margaret Tumelty and Elva O'Callaghan.
"I found this to be one of the best conferences I have ever been at. It covered all issues regardless of background of women."
"Highlight was the invincible, joyful contagious creativity of Lebogang Mashile and fellow workshop facilitators amongst like-minded others."


"Kathleen Lynch and Salome Mbugua-both fully inspirational and dynamic speakers"

Salome Mbugua, Nessa Ni Chasaide and Kathleen Lynch








"The idea of workshops based on tools for analysis and activism was a great one. Drama was pretty good and I've come away with some useful ideas to use."
"Great way of getting people to work together and get changed by this."





"A very interesting and magic way of getting a group to sing together in harmony and sounds and as a means of social change"

"It was a lovely experience. We sang songs asking the men for our voice to be heard in the society; we talked about freedom for women, stop abuse, equality etc."
"Fantastic and amazing experience. Wonderful facilitator."




"I never dared poetry before but I learned a lot about you can write anything. Lebo was brilliant."
"Strong impact, like a catalyst, confirming that expression arises out of lived experience, feelings and responses-words alone are not enough."







"Banúlacht is brave, passionate and invaluable."








Special evening performance of the Vagina Monologues by Ringsend Action Project

Feminists at the WTO: entering the master's house?

(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Audre Lorde)

Banúlacht's decision to send a representative to the WTO was not taken lightly. As a feminist organisation we had to consider the possibility that engaging with the process and participating in the ministerial meeting as an NGO actually legitimates, rather than challenges, the WTO. On the other hand, as an organisation working on women's economic rights, the WTO ministerial is hardly something we could ignore.

Banúlacht participated at the WTO ministerial meeting as a representative of Women in Development Europe (WIDE), which is a member of the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). Each network had a sizeable presence at the WTO, with representatives from all the major regions of the world. Both networks engaged in following the negotiations. WIDE Director, Meagen Baldwin, was a gender adviser on the EU delegation (one of four NGOs in an advisory capacity), and was involved in daily or twice daily briefings at the NGO centre. The IGTN held daily briefings, with inputs and analysis from IGTN analysts and from officials and NGOs on national delegations. Outside of the main venue for official negotiations, WIDE and the IGTN also held workshops and participated in alternative events, including various marches and protests, as well as discussions, panels and other events.

However, unlike feminist engagement in UN spaces (CSW, CEDAW and even UNCTAD, the UN Convention on Trade and Development) where a gender perspective is integral to the processes, feminist analysis is an outsider position in the WTO. The WTO is explicitly about trade liberalisation and nothing else, there is no room for human rights and gender justice arguments within its discussions. Such arguments contest easy understandings and challenge neoliberalism, and would introduce cracks into the WTO logic that trade liberalisation is always good for development. So there is a kind of political screen around the WTO negotiations which it is virtually impossible for WIDE’s, the IGTN’s and other feminist analyses of gender and trade, or critiques from a human rights, labour or environmental perspective to penetrate: we are forced to leave many of our tools outside the master's door.


Women create a 'Junk WTO' tapestry as part of the alternative events held by NGOs in parallel with the WTO ministerial
(Photo: Kristin Sampson, IGTN)

Inside the official spaces at WTO meetings, WIDE and the IGTN don’t focus on mainstreaming gender into trade policy so much as act as trade policy advocates articulating positions in solidarity with countries of the South from a justice and human rights persepctive, aiming to highlight a gender focus in statements, declarations, press releases and on websites.

And to a degree, participating in this way can legitimate the WTO process, in the sense that in order to engage at this level, as insiders, organisations have to use the language of WTO discourse, and focus their policy advocacy at the micro level of technical discussions based on documents produced by the WTO. For Banúlacht, for example, it means deviating from our policy of using the term 'countries of the South', because the WTO documents are phrased in terms of 'developing countries'and 'least developed countries'-the master's language, the master's tools.

But only to a degree, perhaps, because feminist organisations, justice based groups, environmental NGOs, development agencies not only move between the NGO spaces and the official spaces inside the convention centre where the ministerial is held, but can also move between the official spaces and the alternative speaces, swapping colour-coded identity badges for NGO banners. In those spaces the focus is on the bigger picture and the discussions focus not on the minutiae of technical wording, but on the lived experience and detail of people's lives. In those spaces the lived experience, the local and the personal, become political and international through exchange, debate and protest.

And the presence of women farmers, women activists and epecially migrant women in all the alternative venues and in all the protests and demonstrations powerfully illustrated that although the WTO may not think there's any connection between gender equality and trade, women living with the impacts of trade liberalisation have no doubt that it does.


For more reports on the alternative events see earlier reports entitled 'A Walk through Victoria Park' and 'The Elasticity of NGO Women's Time'.

Everything but Development? Reports on key outcomes for countries of the South


Sinagbayan Political Theater Group performing 'FETAD!' (see report entitled 'A Walk through Victoria Park')

Brief report by Banúlacht, followed by an index of reports by the International Gender and Trade Network

What was at stake at the WTO?
· Doha Development Agenda versus global roadmap for trade liberalization
· Development paradigm versus market paradigm
· Flexibility, policy/decision making space of developing countries versus mandatory liberalization and the creation of a “one size fits all” paradigm

The “development package” was used as peacemaker; however, the deal extracted substantial concessions from developing countries in a number of areas:

Increases in aid for trade
A huge proportion of this will be provided as loans. It is a bribe for trade liberalisation because the aid is conditional on implementing the liberalisation, and ‘developing countries’ will be forced to liberalise before they have built up their supply capacity needed to engage in trade.

Non-Agricultural Market Access
Issue: In order for countries of the South to move from specialising in the export of agricultural products and other raw materials, they need to be able develop industries in processed goods. There is more profit to be made in producing a dining table and chairs than in selling timber, and in, say, canned fruit juices than unprocessed fruit. All the industrialised countries have historically used measures, such as import tariffs, to support domestic producers in the face of competition from cheaper imported goods (import substitution). Countries of the South need to have the freedom to impose high tariffs on imports, so that domestic producers are not driven out of business by cheaper imports (more on this on the website). The aim of the WTO is to eliminate these measures, which are seen as ‘trade-distorting’, and one issue at Hong Kong was what type of formula would be adopted for the reduction of tariffs. The formula that was agreed is the ‘Swiss formula’ which cuts higher tariffs proportionately more than lower tariffs, rather than cutting all tariffs at the same rate, ‘developing countries’ tend to impose higher tariffs (to protect local production and as a key source of revenue) so the Swiss formula penalises them disproportionately and deprives them of a key protectionist measure. While the announcement that 97% of tariff lines will be duty free and 3% will be at levels that the US determines sounds good. 3% translates into 300 lines, including all the important products of interest to LDCs, such as textiles.

(Photo: Kirstin Sampson, IGTN)





Services
Trade in services is determined by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Services (GATS). Until now, the GATS has operated on a request-offer system, whereby, Ireland, for example, requests that Ghana open up its banking sector to Irish banks, and Ghana has the option to consider the request or not. The industrialised countries were not satisfied with the rate at which the services sectors in ‘developing countries’ were opening up to foreign service providers. Under the new ‘plurilateral’ approach, if a ‘developing country’ receives a number of requests to open up a sector, then they will have to enter negotiations. This undermines the rights of countries of the South according to their own national needs to choose which service sectors to open and to what extent, and which to develop within their own countries.

Agriculture
The main benefit for the South was the agreement of a date for the final phasing out of export subsidies by developed countries in agriculture by 2013. There are no disciplines on trade distorting domestic support., so the structure of subsidisation by the EU and the US remains intact. This will allow for dumping to continue unabated. The EU can continue to use domestic support to the tune of $55 billion after 2013, by using the so called green box exemption for certain products. With cotton, the WTO calls for elimination of export subsidies by 2006, but does not deal with domestic subsidies under which the majority of trade distorting supports are reported.

Trade is complex and some ‘developing countries’ are aggressive players in trade, what this report focuses on is the impact of the WTO agreement on countries’ capacity to determine their trade policy and resist unbridled liberalisation. See article by Walden Bello on the Focus on the Global South website for more on the role of India and Brazil.


For detailed analysis by the International Gender and Trade Network, see the following links:

Reflection on the Hong Kong WTO Ministerial – Maria Pia Hernandez, IGTN Geneva
Available at

For additional commentary by IGTN on the progression of the Ministerial negotiations and IGTN activities in Hong Kong, please see the articles below, all available on www.igtn.org.

Updates on Ministerial:

WTO Still Standing - Development on Shaky Ground – January 3, 2006

Women’s Lives at Stake: Development Lost in Latest Draft – December 18, 2005

Draft ministerial text negates development – December 17, 2005

Developing Countries Resist the Expansion and Consolidation of Market Access in NAMA and Service – December 16, 2005

Developing Countries Challenge Worst of Draft Ministerial Text – December 15, 2005

WOMEN AT THE WTO DEMAND: NO SELL-OUT ON REAL DEVELOPMENT!!! – December 14, 2005


Note on language
While Banúlacht's policy is to use the term ‘countries of the South’, for purposes of clarity in this report, I use the terms ‘developed’, ‘developing’ and ‘least developed countries’. This is because the distinction between the two categories was crucial at these talks. The ‘Development Round’ was opened at the Doha ministerial, where the Doha Development Declaration was agreed: the distinction between the broad category of ‘developing countries’ and the 50 countries that the UN defines as ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs) is not made in the Doha Development Declaration. In the lead in to the Hong Kong ministerial, the terminology of ‘advanced developing countries’ was increasingly being used to describe the likes of India, Brazil and South Africa, which are major exporters, on the one hand, and distinguish them from the ‘LDCs’, for example Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Timor Leste. This leaves countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Vietnam, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, ‘developing countries’ which have more capacity than the ‘LDCs’ to engage in trade, but are not included in the Development Package, in a grey area.