What is David actually doing in Zambia

Some of you are more familiar with the work I’m going to be doing here as compared to others, so I will try and catch everyone up to speed. For those of you who already know what I’m doing or aren’t that interested in my actual work, you can skip to the next journal entry describing my arrival in Zambia and my impressions from my first week here.

I am working as an Engineers Without Borders volunteer partnered with a locally established non-governmental organisation (NGO) named International Development Enterprises (IDE) (there are a lot of acronyms in development, I apologise now for how much I’m going to overuse them). EWB always partners with organizations that are operated by local people because development is about building a countries ability to help themselves and reducing their dependency on outside organizations in the future. Local organizations have a much better understanding of the cultural contexts behind the work and the history in the area.

There is a massive issue in development with outside people (ie. charities, churches, development workers) coming in from Western countries and either donating things such as food and clothing, or by leading projects that try to improve peoples lives as we see fit, instead of what they see fit. Now, although the intentions of these donations and projects are very well and good, these acts of “charity” actually undermine the local economy as well as peoples confidence that they are able to help themselves. Over the past 50 years, billions of dollars of aid has gone into the developing world from Western countries and very little progress has been made. One of the biggest issues going on in Zambia right now is that there is a ‘culture of dependency’ on other people to help solve their problems. Now, the reasons for this are very complex and I will save going into more detail during this email and save it for another time. The main point is that local leadership and knowledge is essential for a project to be appropriate and sustainable.

So, very simply put, what all of IDE’s work revolves around, is helping poor Zambian farmers to improve their lives. ~65% of Zambians are small-scale farmers (owning less then 1 hectare ( 100m x 100m) of land) and therefore focusing on them is a major key to the countries development. Increasing crop yields for these farmers not only helps them in feeding their own families, but also helps them increase their income by selling their crops to the market and therefore increasing their economic freedom. Currently, most of these farmers are limited in the amount they can grow, not because of lack of access to land to grow the crops, but instead, a lack of access to water to irrigate their fields and a lack of labor available to irrigate larger plots using the current irrigation techniques (ie. drawing water from a well using a rope and bucket). Therefore, IDE focuses on helping farmers gain access to affordable irrigation technology that allows them to farm larger plots and increase their current yields.

One of the most affordable and effective options for improving irrigation is the treadle pump. The treadle pump operates kind of like a manual stair-master that is hooked up to two hoses. A person stands on the treadle pump and then starts walking up and down on the pump causing one hose to suck water out of a river or well, pressurizing it and then distributing it out the other end. This pump works much more efficiently as compared to a typical hand pump because people end up using their entire body weight to pump as opposed to just their arms. The treadle pump has been able to massively increase the amount of irrigated land as it pumps water out around 1 L / second and on average, a Zambian farmer using a treadle pump has been able to increase their income by 600%.
IDE also promotes other irrigation technologies that work in conjunction with the treadle pump.

However, providing farmers access to irrigation isn’t the only thing that is going to solve the problem. As I’ve mentioned before and will time and time again, these problems are very complex. There are many inputs to the process of farming. In order for a farmer to get a treadle pump, they have to be made. Therefore, steel and plastic suppliers have to be able to get their raw materials to manufacturers who make the parts of the pump that are then assembled and sold to the farmers. Also, farmers need access to proper knowledge of what crops to grow that they can sell, what techniques are best for growing those crops and access to proper seeds and fertilizers to grow those crops. Then, when the farmers do grow their crops, they have to be able to effectively harvest them, produce them and sell them to the markets at reasonable prices. Any break in this chain of events is going to cause the work to fail and therefore all areas have to be considered. At the same time, organizations have a very limited resource base to deal with these problems. To tackle this challenge, IDE partners with a number of other local organizations that support all the various stages in the process.

The aim of my and IDE’s work is to ensure that the above aspects are local and less dependent on outside influence. This in turn is aimed at improving Zambia’s local economy and Zambians ability to solve their own problems.

IDE currently has their main office in Lusaka with 15 staff. This main office does all of the management and organizing of the projects throughout the country. There are then around 8 field offices located all over Zambia, manned by 1-4 IDE staff and partnered with our many partners who actually go out into the field and work with farmers.

The job that IDE has given me since I have arrived, is to help restart one of their failing field offices. This office is located in a small community town named Choma. Choma is located in the southern province of Zambia and is about an hour and a half drive north of the major city of Livingstone. Now, an excellent question that should be asked right now is “David, what the hell do you know about restarting and running an IDE field office in Zambia?” Well, that is an excellent question and my very confident and well thought out reply is “I have no clue!” So, here comes my first cry for help from back home. I’m going to be needing all of you to be using some of your fallen of eyelash and first star sighting wishes that you would usually use asking to win the lottery or finding true love, to instead wish for me to gain a clue of how I am actually going to do this. Hopefully, some of those wishes teamed up with me training over the next month in two of IDE’s other field offices will provide me with a better answer to that question.

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