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Introducing food technology: Ten years of SIDO reign
2005-09-16 08:40:41
By Rayner Ngonji
Small Industries Development Organisation (SIDO) in collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development (UNIDO), an agency for small scale industries promotion and Commonwealth Secretariat has for the past ten years been running entrepreneurship and food processing courses for minimum and middleclass wage earners in an effort to improve their standard of living. Staff Writer Rayner Ngonji discusses developments of the project.
Food processing programme was introduced in 1993 with the purpose of promoting small-scale industries with bias to women.
However, massive food loss experienced annually has added weight to the proposal.
The propgramme coordiantor, Happiness Mchovu says they have decided to work with women because they are the ones bestowed with enormous responsibilities of family care.
’’We have opted to give preferential treatment to women because they are the down trodden folk in the society and to a larger extent bear the responsibility of family care,’’ she says.
Food processing technology was unheard of in the early 1990s a situation that compelled SIDO to work on the problem and come up with the proposal of introducing one.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security estimates that 40 per cent of thousands of tonnes of food produced annually including vegetables and fruits get lost through pests and insects due to poor storage.
Some 2.75 million tons of fruits and vegetables are produced annually but only 4 per cent is processed into value added products compared to 60-70 per cent in the United States, 70 per cent in Brazil, 75 per cent in Philippines and 83 per cent in Malaysia.
Tomatoes, bananas, mangoes, cassava, avocado and oranges are the major fruits grown in different parts of Tanzanian that include Morogoro, Tanga, Mbeya, Coast and Iringa regions.
Lack of warehouses, vegetable and fruit processing facilities, inadequate silo capacity and lack of an effective transport and distribution system have been pinpointed as the major contributing factors.
Lack of quality standards and differential pricing of the various grades in order to stimulate farmers to deliver good-quality grain and to reduce losses has also been mentioned as aggravating the problem.
’’What we are trying to do now is to create an awareness amongst the populace so that they know the problem and co-operate, in getting a solution to it,’’ Happiness says.
She maintains that since they are the experts, they know that once the people understand that, it will be easier for them to participate in the battle to wipe it out.
The programme, right from its inception has been implemented in phases with Austria through UNIDO donating all the funds for training operations.
Some US Dollars 400,000 000 (400m/-) were disbursed for the first phase covering the period from 1993 to 1996, whereas in the second phase (1997-2000) US Dollars 700,000 000 (700m/) were committed.
In the third phase from 2001 to 2003 some US Dollars 500,000 000 (500m/-) were injected.
From there the funding exercise changed hands from UNIDO to Commonwealth Secretariat and the government where 235m/- has been disbursed for the fourth and fifth phases.
The programme, designed specifically for entrepreneurship promotion with food processing bias, focuses on three objectives: to assist entrepreneurs improve their performance, empower women and create jobs.
The Coordinator says the idea behind the approach is to equip the up coming entrepreneurs at a small-scale level with the necessary business skills.
Some 2,700 women entrepreneurs along with 120 trainers drawn from different regions have been beneficiaries of the programme launched more than a decade ago.
They have been trained in food hygiene, food preservation, food safety, food processing technology skills and entrepreneurship, business management and records keeping.
The women have been taught to do the following: making of peanut butter, fruit juice, tomato sauce, paste jam, milk processing, sausage making, yogurt, drying vegetables and conversion of grain into nutritious food.
However, the trainers’ number expects to swell to 145 when the current 25 participants complete their training at the end of this month.
The response on the whole has been encouraging. The number of participants showing up in the organised courses tells it all.
’’People are slowly getting our message now’’, says Happiness boastfully. The recent turn up in the on-going course has participants from Mara, Pemba, Singida, Morogoro, Ruvuma, Dodoma Mtwara, Lindi and Dar es Salaam regions and has record attandance, ascertains the claim.
That was the second time for the programme to record such a big turn up. The last number of participants in record was 27 after which an all time moderate rate of attendance featured.
’’We were used to getting between 15 and 17 participants and not beyond that. But this time, surprisingly things have been marvelous,’’ Happiness thundered joyfully.
Some participants have described the programme as useful and catalyst to the struggle of transforming their lives.
Liberatus Maganya from Lindi SIDO Regional Office says the course would help him process fruits for local consumption.
He says the course would also help him conduct courses for fellow entrepreneurs struggling to improve their welfare through individual efforts. Mrs Pancrasia Shirima who works with the Agro Forestry project in Mara Region as a training officer says the course is very useful to her.
’’I am sure I’ll be of much use to the people I work with as they produce a lot of fruits which in most cases during their season are just left to rot because of lack of processing plants.
’’Upon completion of the course, my fellow fruit and vegetable producers will benefit a lot from the knowledge I am going to acquire here as they will use it to expand their businesses,’’ she says.
Womenfolk have for a long time been lagging behind in economic spheres.
Programmes like entrepreneurship, food processing and small loan schemes which are bent on changing the lives of poor women with the agog to develop themselves, stand a big chance to succeed.
But for them to record an impressive success, all resources need to rally behind the already initiated efforts.
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