What everyone around me is doing

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Enterprise Works Tanzania (EW) has three areas it operates in: Tree Crops, Irrigation, and Seed Oil. With Tree Crops, they establish mother orchards with improved tree crop varieties (better tasting, larger fruit, more suitable to the local conditions). Teach farmers about grafting and budding to expand crops, as well various techniques to improve yields on fruit trees (pegging to induce early fruit, stripping leaves to force dormancy). They also cover management skills so they can establish their own nurseries. Recently they have also started to produce Band Saw Mills for lumber processing. These are produced with EW supervision at local workshops.

Under Irrigation we do tube wells and treadle pumps. The funny thing about the pumps is that they are sold under the name of Mkombozi Pampu, which sort of translates as The Saviors Pumps. Our competition sells similar pumps under the name of The Money Maker Pump. Advertising here is not what you would call subtle. The goal is to teach local manufacturers how to build the pumps and then link them with retailers and/or directly to farmers to establish a sustainable market for the pumps. Sounds simple and logical eh? A major problem we are currently having is quality control on the pumps being produced, as well as making the links between the producers and the consumers sustainable. I already talked about Tube Wells in another posting, so I’ll leave them alone.

Under Seed Oil we primarily work with sunflower seeds. This year they established a number of farmers as seed multipliers of an improved variety of sunflower seeds, and got them certified so they can sell to the major seed companies in the region. So they are currently looking to sell 11 tons of seed for the next growing season. We also promote Ram Presses for extracting oil from seeds. This is done in much the same way as the treadle pumps, but on a smaller scale because they are more expensive and a lot more people need to irrigate than find something to do with that huge pile of sunflower (or other kinds) of seeds.

Mostly I have been helping out on random tasks (fixing computers, tagging along on various jobs, helping with proposals and annual reports). The only project I worked on consistently has been “helping” with the construction of the band saw mill. By helping I mostly mean watching and asking questions, and occasionally helping with the easy tasks… like being dead weight on something that needs to be cut. It has been interesting for me because I have never really worked with metal before. I always assumed you had to be much more precise, but from what I have seen it’s just like working with wood. Weld a spot, bend the metal to the right place and weld the next spot. If it doesn’t fit or it’s not the right shape, hit it with something big and heavy. I suppose my point of view could be getting skewed due to the nature of the workshop I am in. Where I have actually been able to help a bit is in taking pictures of the original and putting together some rough sketches with measurements to help build the new one. I’m supposed to put together something a little more complete when we build another one next month.

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