Human Rights and Wongs

Today I began the human rights project for April and May. Before I came, I thought the project would be focused on gender equality, HIV/AIDS awareness, elimination of stigmas surrounding mental health issues and disabilities. It turns out it's more focused on the people's right to a good quality of life. Much of it is based around teaching the people we help about how to improve their quality of life, whether that be by learning practical skills or improving their English. I was taken to my placement by another volunteer via dala-dala. We headed to Murombo, a few kilometres outside of Arusha, where Healthy Integrated Multi-sectorial Services (HIMS) was hosting an entrepreneurial workshop for the locals. Hosting I thought meant facilitating a businessman or speaker to give a seminar on how to start a small business but it actually was the other volunteer and me who gave a workshop on how to transform an idea into a business plan, how to raise the capital needed and how to put the plan into action. Now as someone who has never studied a business course in my life, this was a very interesting introduction into the project and one of the poorer areas of Tanzania. The people there were middle-aged men who had skills and ideas that they wanted to turn into profitable businesses.

We started by attempting to estimate the minimum amount needed for one single person to live. We estimated with help of the local men that one would need per month in rent, 210,000TSH for food and around 60,000TSH for miscellaneous expenses. That totals to about £120. We used this plus a figure of 200,000TSH for material costs for any sort of business plus savings and used the total figure of 500,000TSH for our total expenditure figure. Thus any business plan we had needed to exceed this. A tall order, first of all, for the people to find something to make that sort of money and, secondly, the people in the area have no way to raise the money needed to start up their business. They have no savings, barely any belongings and either the banks refuse to lend them micro-finance loans due to the inability to secure it against a property or the people are unwilling to risk their house.

Next up was the formation of a business plan. Which no one knew how to make. So I suggested that I try to get in touch with some university friends who did business degrees in order to try and get a “master copy”, as the locals had started calling it. We then moved back to the problem of capital. This had us pretty stumped, with saving what little you can by doing what you're doing now or finding outside help in the form of a not-for-profit organisation. Here, I suggested working as a community to form relationships between businesses where, for example, the person growing vegetables would sell to the people who cooked food to sell on the street for slightly cheaper than others and they would, in turn, guarantee them business. After this, we had a small discussion about cutting costs, discovering that one man makes 5000TSH (£2) a day covering only a third of his expenses.

When we arrived back at the office, after some very lengthy closing speeches, I was given an overview of the project and the stuff they do. I think the ones that most interest me are the business related ones and the projects to help the youth groups, including teaching them how to play football. Doesn't sound particularly human rights-y if I compare to the equality issues you deal with in the Western world in the Lancaster bubble but I think this projects is going to be what I make of it.

Later that afternoon, Quirine and I lunched at Africafe spending way more that we should have and then went to the bookshop opposite. Here I decided to buy Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro simply because I love Hemingway and I'm in Tanzania.

So, there you have it. My first day of the human rights project. It is nothing like I expected it would be, structure and guidance is almost non-existent but from a CV point of view, I suppose it's good to get more business related stuff on there, even if it is dealing with small individual projects rather than huge corporations. Anyway, I got called a son-of-a-bitch today by a Tanzanian trying to sell me a safari. Apparently. I didn't understand the Swahili. However, my new tactic to anyone who tries to sell me a safari is to offer to pay them $50 for a five day safari. That gets them riled.