A recap of the week that was...!

Looks like we’ve been gone forever from this site, we are not; here is a recap of the week that was

Thursday 16^th September:  24 hour camp

Yep we worked for twenty four straight hours, started at around 8:30 am, one of our cool facilitator knocks on every door announcing a 24hr camp and by 9:00am we are all set. All morning and part of the afternoon we worked in our campaign three groups: Research and Documentation, Communication and Events group. Tasks were as follows: first group framed the case story of the campaign and prepared for a field research. Group two was to deal with the communication aspect of the campaign, the message and the target and the last group was to come up with events for the campaign and particularly for a march to be held on Saturday .We were later to present this to a team of experts some big shots in NGO work in Tanzania at 5pm, after which we were to go back and take in their feedback and redo the task. We managed to cover at least 22 hours and energies were still high mission was accomplished.

Friday: Preparing for the UN march past

The march past was organized by a group called Global Call against Poverty, the goal was to push for the accelerated achievement of the MDGS, given that hunger tops the MDGs, this march provided a platform for us to present our campaign slogan, “Punch Hunger”.  We come up with T shirts, and two banners. One with slogan and was blank to have others write what their solution to hunger were.

Saturday… UN March Past

 We Joined the GCAP from UN Offices in Kinondoni, to Biafra grounds. It was a success. The Citizen newspaper wrote an article on us, and Nipashe had a picture of our blank banner.

We rested on Sunday, and Monday we had a debrief of the 24hr Camp, and UN march past, later in the afternoon we started preparing for a one week field research ( 25^th September to 2^nd October).  Tuesday we sent a team to survey the proposed sites for the research.  After that we agreed to going two districts: Rufiji and Kisarawe covering 11 villages in total. We will keep you posted on our visit, better still we try take you with us to Kisarawe, Rufiji and back to the platform.

Cultural Exchange

In all our blog posts we have talked about our project, but in this post I would like to look in to who we are as a group and add on to the dimension on what we are actually gaining from this course. In our group we are 20 people from 7 different countries in the age between 20-31 years. We have both Christians and Muslims and of course different sub religions from these two. We also have people who are none religious. We go to school together and besides that we also all live together under the same roof, a lot of us even in the same room. We prepare dinner together, we watch TV together, we eat together - in short we do almost everything together. The result of all this is a lot of cultural exchange. We have had a lot of interesting conversations about religion, homosexuality, manners, traditions etc. I think that in the process of this course we learn a lot about each others cultures and I think through this we actually also learn a lot about our own culture. The reason for posting this blog is a thought I got from thinking about this cultural exchange, that maybe in social change a key word should be exchange, wether it is culture, knowledge or other aspects, because I think in learning about others we can learn more about our selves and our backgrounds and through this knowledge we can learn our strengths and weaknesses.

Our First Public Appearance

Today we attended the press conference held by Action Aid Tanzania, to launch their HungerFREE Scorecard 2010 – Who’s really fighting hunger? The scorecard reveals that 20 out of 28 poor nationsare of track to halving hunger by 2015 whereof 12 are going backwards. Tanzania is ranked as number 15 out of 28, which only shows that much needs to be done still!

This was our first public appearance and engagement with the media. We presented ourselves and our slogan PUNCH HUNGER (Piga Vita Njaa!!) and had three of our group members interviewed by Radio Cloud FM Tanzania – SO COOL J

Also, we were asked by The Daily News to write an article on us and our campaign.

We are so motivated after this day and are looking even more forward to Saturday where we will join a procession to mark the UN summit in New York next week. We’ll keep you posted on the details…





A Global Change Event coming up

On Thursday the 14th of September you have the chance the join us in action against hunger.
This day is going to be our first event as a social change group and therefore our first chance to tell our message – Punch Hunger!
On this special Thursday Action Aid Tanzania, Oxfam and a movement called GCAP (Global Call to Action Against Poverty) are coming together to present the HungerFree score card that will evaluates where the worlds countries are in the progress on fulfilling their commitments to end the global hunger.
This is our chance to let our message out in cooperation with them, to put pressure on the UN and its obligation to meet the Millennium Development Goal number 1– halving the hunger by 2015.
There will be a lot of different activities this day including our events, so join us!
Help us in the combat to fight hunger. This is a problem caused by people; therefore it will take people to chance it. Let your voice be heard!
So meet us at the UN building off Kinodoni Road at 10 o’clock.

Can we Punch Hunger??? - …Well not on our own!!!

 On Friday the 10^th of September we had a lecture by Rakesh Rajani, where we discussed our campaign objective and whether it is actually possible for us to reach our objective (an objective that we had decided on, only one hour before Mr. Rajanis arrival) regarding policies on biofuel investments that won’t compromise food security in Tanzania. He started out questioning our newly constructed objective by saying is it really going to make a difference for the people involved? Maybe working with policies and thereby working from the top down is not the way forward? Maybe we need to start on a ground level and see what qualities are actually already in the group of people that we are working with, which in our case are the small-scale farmers, and what can be used in combating their issues. Their being a key word, for that is what this is, it is their fight and we therefore need to make them involved and use their power. We need to see what is powerful in these people and connect with that. This can be exemplified in an exercise we did last week, where we in two groups had to plan a fictive party – the first group had to always say ‘yes, but…’ to all the suggestions given and the other group had to say ‘ yes, and…’ This led to a result where the first group didn’t manage to plan a party and the other one managed to plan several different ones. What we can learn from that is that if we build on the resources, which are already there, we can get further.

According to Mr. Rajani it is often the NGO’s agenda that decides the topic of a campaign, but the job of the NGO should instead be to listen to the people’s stories and not teach them about wrong and right. We are not the ones who should be heard, we are the ones that should make sure that the effected people are being heard. A quote from the lecture is: ‘Campaigns don’t change the world alone – people change the world!’ This means in order for us to make this campaign work we have to get the effected people involved. Now the question is, how are we going to do that??? This we don’t have the answer for yet, but hopefully we will be able to figure out a solution within the next couple of weeks.

One thing is for sure, Mr. Rajani encouraged us to be critical of our own campaign and our own role in this campaign, and this is a really important element in making a campaign, and something we really need to think about in the future. This is also a call for people here on the blog to comment on some of our posts, and be critical to what we write, because sometimes in the process of work you need to be pulled out of your mode and to have a wake up call.

The Role of policies in tackling hunger

The big fat contradiction of having close to a billion people being hungry and an equal number being overweight is an irrefutable indicator that the causes of hunger are rarely natural causes but policies related. Policies touching on agricultural production play a very big role in escalating or addressing the problem of hunger.

I will give a classical example of the Structural Adjustment Program(SAPS)s imposed on developing countries in the 1980s spilling into 1990s,by the world bank and IMF, among the stipulation of this programs was to have governments in this country cut down on state expenditure and privatizations of parastatols  .agriculture suffered  most from this proviso-before then the government used to subsidize the cost of fertilizers, seeds and played a big role in helping the farmers market the products through the use of marketing boards- this created a genuine boast and Africa did not only feed its population but  exported food to the rest of the world. 

Flowing from the SAPS, farmers were now producing at a higher cost and to add salts to the injury they had no one to help with the marketing instead they had to compete with private investors and influx of cheap imported foods, this meant agriculture was no longer profitable especially for the same scale farmers. The private investors did not quite fill the gap created when the government stopped subsidizing and investing in agriculture. the result of this were catastrophic-lower food production and over reliance on imported which is susceptible to global market variation. This problem caused by the SAPs has subsisted to the 21st Century and is one of the classical causes of hunger stories in Africa and most developing countries. It destroyed Africa´`s agriculture. Africa is not only unable to feed itself but now a net food importer.

Policies can also positively tackle hunger in a positive way. The 2006 Maputo Plan of Action required that African government allocate 10% of their national budget to Agriculture. Most are yet to live upto this but there are success stories of which Tanzania is one of them. It is not yet a 10% increase but there has been an increase to about 7% and this could may able explain the ``kilimo kwanza Intiative``.

Another example of how policies contribute to hunger is the recent attempt of the US and the EU to increase their use of Bio fuels, This attempt has increased demand for bio fuels and explains why investors are buying land en masses to plant crops used for biofuels production but who would blame them there are incentives in place that makes farming of those profitable.   Entry of biofuels in the market would entail a competition of with food crops which threaten the food security which is already in jeopardy .    By advocating for policies and laws governing the production of bio fuels we are simply asking that measures be put in place to ensure every arable agriculture is safeguarded for food crop farming and that biofuel farming does not  take up all the valuable resources for farming of food. if this is left for the market forces then the prices of food crops would be very high and more people would not be in a position to afford sufficient food!     





   

Illustration by Ida and Signe - Students of the Global Change course in Tanzania

Fighting Hunger a Collective Responsibility!

Over the years, we've been inundated with the statistics and the pictures of poverty around the world-so much so that many people in both the North and South have come to accept it as an unfortunate but unalterable state of affairs. The truth, however, is that things have changed in recent years. The world today is more prosperous than it ever has been. The technological advances we have seen in recent years have created encouraging new opportunities to improve economies and reduce hunger.
To think that 1.02billion people are hungry, when the world is more prosperous than it has ever been... has to be taken in with a pinch of salt. There is an extremely unequal income distribution in the world and within specific countries.
To be honest it’s very easy to watch and even rely on the United Nations, government, or donors to deal with the hunger issue whilst we sit fold our arms and pretend everything is okay. Fighting hunger is a collective responsibility...The little contribution that you and I could make as individuals would definitely go along way...What if we embraced the bible theory were the people that had more than enough reached out to the poor.. For instance in the first centuries of Christianity the poor were fed, clothed, and sheltered at a personal sacrifice.
Fighting hunger is a collective responsibility... if every individual who earns a little extra income more than they need, takes interest and offers to feed/ sponsor one child in school, hunger will be history, and even within the poorest of nations this is possible because it is within these same countries that the gap between the rich and poor is wide. The tendency of waiting for external help to feed our hungry within a country must come to an end... The time to take responsibility is NOW!
The global change in Tanzania is working tirelessly to hold a successful campaign that will consequently contribute to PUNCHING HUNGER out of Tanzania; we are taking a step further by not only discussing challenges but taking responsibility to act off these challenges.

Thoughts by Nankonde Nakanyika.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

We the Global Change students continue to explore Tanzania in reference to fighting hunger. We have shown interest in the works of other organizations fighting the same cause. Such organizations includes among others the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) which we visited Tuesday afternoon.

The meeting was interesting and we really appreciate the works of such organizations and we are looking forward to be building relationships with a shared understanding, commitment and collaborative action. This will help us and give us having the courage as we are being equipped with resources and make us believe that our imaginations are realistic.

We are the David of today, fighting the very powerful giant hunger. We come with courage, and just like David, we are the young shepherd, to whom God has given courage to face the giant and our success comes with commitment and good relationships so as to achieve our goals.

Join us in the struggle as we continue our hunger fight to free the hungry billion through building good relationships!

- Thoughts from Bellah, a student of Global Change

PUNCH HUNGER

Are biofuels worth the investments in the east Africa?

  As students of Global Change Course 2010 Tanzania and on behalf of our trainers we are so much touched by the issue of biofuels not only in Tanzania but in Africa as a whole, we all believe it’s a challenge to food security and hunger related issues.

As we are embarking on our second week as we are pushing on our course in order to go for our goal of saving the 800 million people still living in hunger despite the world politician’s radical statements to end poverty and hunger. As part of our campaigns, biofuels has become a topical issue in relation to food security and let’s take a case study of biofuels in northern part of Tanzania. the investment  of jatrophain the  northern Tanzania is a risky venture, according to my survey  it came on my notice that the cost-benefit analysis reveals that farmers will only start earning money after yields  of around 3,00o kilograms per hectare of jatropha seed, it has also revealed that fertile land in northern Tanzania has been sacrificed to grow the oil-rich jatropha and this still a rather risky and long term investment with insecure prospects and high opportunity costs, this is happening in many African countries as a huge chunks of fertile land are taken for the several biofuels sources being considered as the world searches for alternatives to fossil fuels. When energy prices soared in 2007, manycompanies, private investors, NGOs, farmers and national as well as local governments from developed and developing countries embarked on jatropha ventures, this is a thorn in the fresh and has negative implications especially in this when the world is facing three interconnected problems of poverty, hunger and climate. here in Tanzania, the viability of jatropha seed production is yet to be thoroughly assessed though there have been some investigations into its feasibility in east Africa but these has been largely based on assumptions of data from else where which are not neither applicable nor dependable in reality. It is quiet disappointing to note that despite of data, more than 10,000 small holder farmers in Tanzania are establishing jatropha plantations. the situation worsened by the fact that many farmers tend to intercrop jatropha with food crops on arable land thus reducing food production for little or no gain. this reminds me hedges in his book stuffed and starved where he talks about lack of farmers choice and he puts it very clear,” the majority of world’s farmers are suffering, some are selling off their land to become laborers on their family plots, some migrate to the cities or overseas, a few, too many resort to suicide” the same story will happen I predict. The current situation shows that jatropha cultivation is only profitable under certain conditions and unlike

Kelly to substantially increase employment the income in rural areas, this can be evinced in the management and harvesting of jatropha requires considerable labor in put of which local poor farmers can not afford. in a nutshell, it is very important to note that the poor farmers are going to be underpaid, loosing their suitable land, shifting from food production to jatropha,becoming squatters on their own land, because there is no policy framework, and the legal frame work is not clear as the farmers can not take part in the sell and compensation of their suitable land directly but only literature on papers full of empty promises, which  will never happen until Jesus comes back, of which am not so sure.

Kiranda: student global change 2010 Tanzania.