TANZANIA

Tanzania welcomes the Danish Queen

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY CHARLOTTE LUND DIDERIKSEN

Denmark’s long-term commitment as one of Tanzania’s principal development assistance providers was celebrated when Queen Margrethe visited the country at the beginning of November. In the village of Dakawa in the Morogoro region everything was buzzing with excitement.

Normally, Dakawa in central Tanzania is an ordinary village of mud huts roofed with palm leaves, and winding roads heavily caked in red dust. But on this Tuesday morning in early November, the village looks far from ordinary. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is paying a visit, and every ounce of energy is being put into making the welcome as festive as possible.

BALLOONS AND BANNERS

House walls, mango trees and even the village’s sole tractor are decorated with bows, flowers, green branches and metre-long banners with the inscription ”Welcome Her Majesty The Queen of Denmark”. These words are also written in large letters across many of the dancers’ white T-shirts, which have been specially made for the occasion.

In the middle of the village a platform has been erected. The right side is decorated with flowers and balloons in green, yellow, blue and black, the colours of the Tanzanian flag. The left side is picked out in a wonderfully contrasting red and white, Denmark’s national colours. Because this is not the queen of an unknown land who is visiting the village. The area has received financial assistance from Denmark for many years to develop its farming.

TIME-SAVING RICE MILL

Denmark has put years of support into establishing a cooperative society of farmers in this locality. Today it has 580 members cultivating an area of around 2,000 hectares. The aim is to enable the export of part of the harvest to other areas, and so start earning money. The norm here has so far been mainly a subsistence economy, which is vulnerable to price rises and bad yields. Money from exporting parts of the yield will give the village the opportunity to save for the lean times.

Dakawa’s principal crop is rice, and shelling the rice was previously very time-consuming work for the women in the village.

”It takes around three hours per day to remove enough rice shells to feed a family, if it is done manually”, says co-operative member Sedi Kwedija. But now it is no longer necessary to spend most of the day shelling rice. With development assistance from Denmark, a rice mill has been built in Dakawa. It quickly shells the rice and saves the women a lot of daily work.

A GREAT DAY

When the official cars with their police escort arrive, the cheering swells, and when Queen Margrethe steps out of the black four-wheel drive vehicle decorated with the flags of both nations, the noise is deafening. Dancers and singers cheer the Danish Queen, while the audience applauds. When Her Majesty is finally seated in the decorated red plastic chair on the platform, everyone’s hands are waving in the air.

After speeches and a gift presenting ceremony, the time comes for the queen to stroll down a section of the village’s main street to take a closer look at the processing of the rice – and to visit a selected family in one of the village’s huts.

”It is a great day for Dakawa to have a visit from such a fine lady,” states Sedi Kwedija, as he presses his way through the crowd with his arms aloft, following as closely as he can in the footsteps of Queen Margrethe.

Shelling rice was previously a manual task which took several hours a day.

Tanzania: Danish development assistance with special significance

BY ULRIKKE MOUSTGAARD

For more than 45 years, Denmark has supported Tanzania, which is both the first and largest recipient of Danish development assistance. Today Tanzania exemplifies Denmark’s involvement in the world’s poor countries

When the Danish Head of State HM Queen Margrethe set foot on Tanzanian soil in November 2008 on her first official state visit to the country, she was following directly in her father’s footsteps.

Her father, King Frederik IX, visited Tanzania several times – both on official state visits and privately – and he also received a visit himself from Tanzania’s former President, Julius Kambarage Nyerere.

The two men had a close relation to each other – and not without reason.

In 1962, Nyerere became Tanzania’s first president following the country’s independence. At the same time, Denmark chose Tanzania as the very first recipient of the then new Danish development assistance to the third world.

Tanzania and Denmark have had close connections ever since. For more than 45 years Denmark has been among the largest bilateral donors to Tanzania, and Tanzania is the country to which Denmark gives the largest share its long-term development assistance.

For Denmark, the many years of involvement in Tanzania have brought a wealth of experience. From the time the first school was built with Danish money and right up to today, Danish development assistance for Tanzania has had special significance. The country is a living example of how Danish development assistance has evolved over almost five decades to achieve a big league position in international development assistance.

To the ordinary Dane too, Tanzania is something special and for many, symbolises Denmark’s development assistance.

“In colonial times, the British liked to refer to India as “the Jewel of the Empire”. With all the reservations regarding the negative associations of this expression today, one can say that Tanzania became the “jewel” of Danish development assistance – and that is meant in a positive way”, says Professor Holger Bernt Hansen of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He is the grand old man of Danish development assistance, chairman of the board of Danida (Danish International Development Agency) and as an Africa expert he has followed Denmark’s involvement in Tanzania at close range from the start.

AGRICULTURE AND EDUCATION

The first time Holger Bernt Hansen visited Tanzania was in 1964, when the first Danish development assistance projects in the country – focused especially on schools and agriculture –were taking shape.

In the early 1960s, together with the other countries in the Nordic region, Denmark built a large educational centre in Kibaha, about 100 kilometres from Dar es Salaam. It consisted of an agricultural college, a health centre and an upper secondary school with space for 500 boarding pupils. The school’s staff was mainly stationed personnel from the Nordic region.

The project was a great success and laid the foundation for Denmark’s further involvement in the East African country.

Danish development assistance was at the time on its maiden voyage in international collaboration. Indeed Denmark had had missionaries in both Asia and Africa since the mid-1800s, and ten years before, private aid organisations had started to dispatch workers to India and Ghana in particular. But Denmark did not have a state aid programme as such, and was feeling its way as it went along.

Denmark started by supporting a few projects in Tanzania, usually with one-off development assistance, in the same geographic area and with stationed Danish staff. The money was typically used for building schools, hospital units, teacher training colleges and agricultural colleges.

Agriculture and education were Denmark’s preferred areas for providing development assistance, because this was where its strength lay.

MUTUAL JOY

The incipient collaboration between Denmark and Tanzania was a win-win situation, of sorts.

For Tanzania, Danish interest was an obvious help in its efforts to create a new, independent country based on socialist precepts. The newly incumbent President Nyerere admired the Nordic welfare model, and was happy to accept Danish development assistance.

For Denmark, Tanzania was an opportunity to spread the joyful message of democracy, agricultural development and education, with which Denmark itself was greatly occupied. Denmark felt it had something to offer.

“We could teach and pass on good ideas from our own development, especially our agricultural development”, says Holger Bernt Hansen.

Tanzania was not unknown in Denmark at the time. Denmark’s largest company A.P. Møller had a sugar factory in Tanzania. And Danes knew of Julius Nyerere. To Denmark, Tanzania’s president was the personification of freedom, independence and change – just as Ghandi was in India, which Denmark also supported. President Nyerere also looked favourably on Danish ideas of solidarity, cooperative movements, high schools and adult education. His visions for reforming the educational system in Tanzania fitted in perfectly with what Denmark believed it was good at.

So many Danes supported the idea of Denmark giving aid to Tanzania, including the Danish business community and the agricultural sector.

FOCUS ON POVERTY

When Denmark began providing development assistance to Tanzania in 1962, it was thought that development would happen largely by itself, so long as one took the right initiatives and showed a good example. Denmark quickly moved into Tanzania, and it was thought that it would quickly move out again. But theory and practice turned out to be different.

Poverty in Tanzania had not lessened over the years that Denmark provided development assistance to the country, social inequalities were still entrenched and the oil crisis in the 1970s didn’t help. So from the 1970s onwards, Denmark focused on poverty in its development assistance.

Combating poverty became a key priority in all Denmark’s development assistance work, and in Tanzania it meant that Denmark strengthened its efforts in the most impoverished parts of the country, namely the rural areas where Denmark wanted to help “the poorest of the poor”.

“It became a Danish hallmark. Combating poverty was the distinctive feature of Danish development assistance”, says Holger Bernt Hansen.

Clean water, roads and free education were aimed at the poorest of all. Support had to be given to the poorest farmer, who starved and had hardly a cow to his name.

FROM PROJECT SUPPORT TO SECTOR SUPPORT

If enough schools, water pumps and hospitals are built, development will happen by itself. That is roughly how you could describe Denmark’s development assistance approach in the first 10 or 20 years. But Tanzania knew that Denmark was wrong.

There is no point in providing good farming equipment, if no one knows how to repair it when it breaks. Nor is it any use investing in a water pump, if no one in the local area takes responsibility for maintaining it, because people simply become accustomed to getting a new one when it breaks. Or to believe that by building a few schools, education will spread through the population like ripples in the water.

So through the 1970s and 1980s, Denmark adjusted its way of providing development assistance by gradually shifting from individual projects to larger programmes.

“Forward planning was implemented. A policy and development plan for the agricultural sector was made, and both Tanzanians and the relevant ministries were increasingly included”, explains Holger Bernt Hansen.

Denmark also gradually started supporting whole sectors rather than isolated projects. The idea was that if you supported the whole instead of component parts, development assistance would become more effective. You cannot improve the population’s health just by building a hospital. Staff must also be trained, equipment is needed and the building must be maintained.

As an Africa expert, Professor Holger Bernt Hansen of the Centre for African Studies at Copenhagen University, has followed Denmark’s involvement in Tanzania at close range from the start. Photo Karsten Bidstrup.

SPECIAL COUNTRIES AND CONSIDERATIONS

In the 1980s, Denmark became much more focused on the efficiency of development assistance in Tanzania. The same idea spread to other Danish development assistance. Denmark supported projects and sectors in several countries – as many as 60 or 70 – and it was thought that the money would be better spent if it were distributed to some specially selected countries.

“There were projects everywhere and it wasn’t possible to overview them”, says Holger Bernt Hansen.

Denmark therefore introduced a collaboration programme: 18 countries – today it is 16 – were selected to receive Danish bilateral support. Tanzania was one of them. A Danish embassy was established in all the countries to be close to the programmes and also to include local people in the development work instead of the many expensive stationed Danish staff.

At the same time, Denmark became occupied with the environment, equality and human rights, so these areas were integrated in all Danish-supported development activities. In Tanzania it meant that women were thought into the development assistance projects. The thinking was that if women in Tanzania didn’t get the same educational and job opportunities as men, the society would not be able to develop. So women had to be involved in order for a project to receive Danish support.

CHANGING TO OWNERSHIP

Despite its modest size, Denmark has received high praise for many years for its development assistance work, which has been judged the world’s best several times. Danish development assistance experts are present throughout the world and Tanzania is no exception.

In the 1990s, Denmark realised that there were probably too many Danish experts in Tanzania. Twice as much money was spent on foreign experts in Tanzania as on salaries

to locally employed Tanzanians. A report prepared by Denmark together with the rest of the Nordic region, showed that the Nordic experts in Tanzania were capable enough at their work, but not quite as capable in transferring their skills to the Tanzanians. As a result the country was actually weakened, because the projects and institutions that were built in Tanzania could not function without the assistance of foreign experts.

So Denmark changed its development assistance. Now the new word was “ownership”. The number of stationed Danes was cut and local labour was used instead. It matched well with the trend in international society to increasingly focus on the need of developing countries in Africa to take over the management of their affairs and responsibility for their development.

Denmark also started to join other donors in Tanzania in making its development assistance more effective. They agreed to put an end to development assistance for individual projects. Instead of several donors putting money into individual projects spread across all sectors, donors now concentrated their efforts on a few selected sectors.

SUPPORT FOR THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY

Denmark is not the only country that has developed a fondness for Tanzania.

Many donors are present in the country, which has been completely dependent on donor aid for many years: almost half the state budget is financed from donor funds.

For Denmark, this fact has given rise to serious reflection on the sustainability and effectiveness of development assistance, which is one of the reasons Denmark became a staunch advocate of ownership.

This concern has also resulted in Denmark becoming a firm advocate of providing

development assistance to the private sector in Tanzania. To set the economic wheels in motion in Tanzania and make the country more autonomous, the business community had to be involved, Denmark thought.

So in 1998, Denmark established a business sector programme in Tanzania. The purpose was to create jobs and economic growth. The recipe included improvements in Tanzania’s vocational training programmes so that they matched the needs of the business community; help for small and medium-sized enterprises to obtain knowledge and technology; greater access for the poor to take up loans to invest in for example a cow, a sewing-machine or a shop; and support for building the necessary institutions, including unions and Tanzania’s Maritime and Commercial Court. The latter was especially important in order to attract investments to the country. Issues such as the right to land needed to be dealt with – and it was necessary to be able to deal with them quickly.

A MAJOR SUCCESS

The programme was the first of its kind in Danish development assistance. Denmark had never previously had a development programme that targeted the business sector of a poor country. Not surprisingly, Danida met many protests. Many thought that the poor would be neglected if the business community received the development assistance. But
the experiment turned out to be a great success. Tanzania’s economic growth increased. Danida has now applied the scheme to other countries such as Ghana and Vietnam, where Denmark provides aid.

Holger Bernt Hansen thinks that the support of the private sector is one of the great Danish successes in Tanzania. Another has been the collaboration between the two countries concerning democratisation – not least when Tanzania went from a one-party system to a multi-party system.

But there are still challenges to be faced in Tanzania, especially the country’s dependence on development assistance. Perhaps more foreign investment could solve part of the problem. The Danish business community is in any event just as interested in Tanzania as the agricultural sector was when Denmark started its long liaison with the country in 1962.

When the Danish Queen recently made her state visit to Tanzania, she was accompanied by a Danish business delegation of 40 companies with plans to explore business opportunities in Tanzania.

Danish refrigeration success helps Tanzania

TEXT AND PHOTO BY CHARLOTTE LUND DIDERIKSEN

UniCool’s new air conditioning system, seen here being delivered to a customer, uses less energy than conventional systems.

Development work and sound business principles go hand in hand at the Danish refrigeration company UniCool A/S. Over the last 3 years, UniCool has focused on training local Tanzanians as refrigeration technicians and has created a successful and locally embedded company.

Until recently, most of the high-tech work in Tanzania was carried out by South African and Arab contractors travelling the country with their staff for limited periods. The implication of this was that all the experience, the important specialised technical knowledge and the payment for the work, left the country again together with the foreign companies, when the work in Tanzania had been completed. Tanzania was maintained in its dependency on foreign experts every time high-tech challenges needed to be met – and Tanzanian technicians were deterred from acquiring knowledge and competences to manage on the global market.

But in the refrigeration industry, the negative spiral has changed. Denmark’s UniCool has a different business strategy: instead of bringing its own experts from Denmark, it employs local people from the country’s technical colleges and gives them comprehensive training as refrigeration technicians. It means that at UniCool, it is the Tanzanians themselves who gain both the expert knowledge and salary for the high-tech tasks that are carried out in their own country.

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UniCool A/S produces refrigeration technology for cooling electrical installations such as server rooms and telephone exchanges. It is important that this kind of high-tech equipment is prevented from overheating, since outages can have serious effects e.g. the country’s telephone network can be put out of action for days. It requires extensive specialised knowledge to work with refrigeration technology, and that knowledge needs to be present in the country to deal with any problems that may occur.

But it has not always been easy to transform inexperienced local people into high-tech equipment technicians.

”The books in Tanzania’s technical colleges are more than 40 years old, so they cannot teach anything about the technology in use today. It can be fatal not to have the necessary knowledge when you work with electricity”, says refrigeration technician Jeppe Bjerre, who is a supervisor at UniCool in Tanzania.

The company tackled the problem by sending its staff on a three month course in Denmark and by bringing a Danish technical college teacher to Tanzania to provide them with training. The initiative was successful and UniCool’s Tanzanian staff are today significantly better at carrying out their work.

”The people here are certainly not daft. They have just had shockingly poor opportunities to develop their competences. We can clearly see this with our staff, because they have progressed a very long way since we started here”, states Jeppe Bjerre.

AFRICA HAS POTENTIAL

The African experience has so far turned out extremely well for the Danish refrigeration company. Today, UniCool is in high demand, with a full order book and an integrated collaboration with Africa’s leading telecom giants. For its part, Tanzania has gained a set of competent refrigeration installation experts with specialist knowledge that was previously lacking – and they are staying in the country.

The benefits go both ways. UniCool’s director Ole Hoffmann Hansen comments that from the Danish perspective they have gained a much more varied view of Africa’s population and potential than the disheartening picture that TV broadcasts of war and hunger can otherwise display.

”Development is really happening fast here, and Africa is full of resources which have been ignored for a long time”, says Ole Hoffmann Hansen. He thinks that the knowledge and the jobs that follow in the wake of foreign investments will actively propel African countries onto the global market.

T-shirts create development

BY CHARLOTTE LUND DIDERIKSEN

Photo: Kibotrade.

Organic clothing made under proper conditions can help push Africa in the right direction for economic development. So thinks the Danish company Kibotrade, which produces T-shirts in Tanzania for quality-conscious consumers all over the world.

It all started with a love of Africa and became a flourishing company, which has created jobs on the impoverished continent.

After having worked in Tanzania’s commercial court, Ivar Rosenkrantz could clearly see the potential in creating a company in the country, and that idea has come to fruition. With help from the internationally known Danish fashion firm Samsøe Samsøe, which sells the product, the right local partner with a solid knowledge of business conditions in Tanzania, and financial start-up support from Danish development assistance, Ivar Rosenkrantz can today call himself managing director of Kibotrade, a successful manufacturer of T-shirts based in Dar es Salaam.

SUSTAINABLE AMBITIONS

The basic idea of Kibotrade is to show the world that organic quality products, made under proper working conditions, easily can be produced in Africa – a continent which otherwise has no great tradition as a destination for foreign investment. Ivar Rosenkrantz believes that sustainable business solutions can develop a poor country just as much as development assistance from the large aid agencies. He also says that the thought of African investment is very new to most investors.

”People are usually very surprised to hear that products of such quality can advantageously be produced in Africa. It is normally South East Asia that has this market,” states Ivar Rosenkrantz.

But they can produce them. And to such an extent that Kibotrade will soon gain the much sought-after SA8000- certificate, which demonstrates a company’s high standard in working conditions, safety and environmental responsibility. In addition, the employed sewing machinists, of whom two thirds are women, are offered further training and courses in English. With the introduction of these working conditions, Kibotrade hopes that it can become a role model for locally-owned companies in the country.

The sustainable dimension of the company strategy can also be seen in the decision to spend 10 per cent of its revenue on school projects in the country’s SOS Children’s Villages. Kibotrade does this to give Tanzanians the educational ballast required to get into the labour market and help to create economic improvement.

INVEST WITH YOUR HEART

The road to success in Tanzania is not without stones, and Ivar Rosenkrantz emphasises that the desire to create development in Africa is a significant argument for the company’s choice of Tanzania as the production place.

”We have had several logistic problems in the country. For instance the port, from where we export our clothes to Europe, is burdened with bureaucracy which slows down our working procedures. So it has naturally been a challenge for us,” says Ivar Rosenkrantz, who points out that it is generally still easier to get goods produced in Asia. On the other hand, with African investments one can really make a difference on a continent which in many areas is left out of global economic trade.

”It is simply the case that with Kibotrade we are doing a piece of profit- and business-oriented development work, where the investment is made just as much with the heart as the head,” ends Ivar Rosenkrantz, managing director of Kibotrade in Tanzania.