Work isn’t really work

It’s 2:40 am. A rooster is crowing outside my window. Who in the world thought about domesticating these birds?

Now that I’m up and unable to fall back into slumber, I might as well give you an update.

Work has been pretty crazy the last two days. But I’m really starting to see how I fit into the whole picture of SC’s work here; especially my role and involvement in the legitimisation of urban agriculture part.

Let me explain that.

Almost none of the farmers in the city (which there are A LOT, something like 40% of the city population is involved with urban agriculture in some form or another. But then, there isn’t really even an accurate number of how many people live in the city. Officially, there are 4 million inhabitants, but guesses can go up to 10 million. Dar es Salaam is *the* major city migrant workers go to; everyone comes here to try to “make it.” The number of unplanned settlements (new trendy word for slums) makes it hard to actually do a census. – phew, that was a long aside…sorry) have secure land tenure, meaning they farm on land that is not legally theirs. They could have asked for permission from the land owner, whether it is private land or the local government, but usually they do not have a formal contract for long term use. Hence, if the owners decide, they could be very quickly evicted.

As you can imagine, this insecure land tenure issue can bring about a ton of problems. Uncertainty (and it’s scary because this is your whole livelihood) for one, but also inability to invest in the land. For example, many of the farmers would like to irrigate with clean water (who wouldn’t?) but they can’t get any funding or help to install wells or boreholes because no one would fund a project that can be taken over by the land owners any day.

In fact, almost all of the complaints that the farmers have can be related back to the fact that they don’t have any ownership whatsoever over the land they farm.

So that brings us to why I do my work here.

In the short term, we’re trying to help these farmers with the issues we can currently address. Mainly, it’s about building their capacities, which is development jargon for training them in some skills or encouraging them to be confident in applying their skills (“empowering”). For example, right now we’re organizing a training week that includes workshops in marketing, entrepreneurship, and environmentally good practices (“agronomy” – for some reason, this is what they call it here). These are the top issues the farmers identified and we’re trying to help. We actually just had a very fruitful meeting with the trainers and farmer representatives yesterday. Very happy.

But the main reason I was happy about the meeting yesterday isn’t all because it seemed like the farmers are interested in the training. It’s because this training is the first step in getting towards our long term goal.

Eventually, one day, we hope to get urban agriculture land to become a legitimate land use in urban areas. In cities, land use planning involves “zones,” where places are left aside for residential housing, commercial activity, green space, public institutions etc. We want urban agriculture to become one of those zones. The problem with this in Dar es Salaam (and actually many places) is that city planners often fail to see why agriculture should be zoned in the city. There is still very much (as with most places in the world) a view that agriculture is completely a rural activity. (If you’re thinking, well, duh, of course farming is a rural activity, then I will have to explain in another post).

Which, you know, simply means that they are dismissing 40% of the city population’s livelihoods as irrelevant. Even if you don’t agree agriculture should be done in cities, shouldn’t the planning of cities be for the benefits of the inhabitants?

So on the last day of this training week, we are going to get a bit political (which is always interesting). We’re trying to bring together the head planners of each municipality (there are 3), heads of the municipal agriculture offices, representative from the national Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement, and representatives from farmers groups. We’re trying to get a discussion going and give an opportunity for the farmers to directly converse with these government officials, who, frankly, don’t listen enough. Hopefully, we’ll also get a rough draft of maps of where areas of urban agriculture should be zoned.

I was very happy with the meeting yesterday because it seemed like we got our point across to the farmers that this last training day is going to be very important. Be prepared for it. Discuss with your groups and write down what your main concerns are. Maybe even draw a map of what you think should be zoned as urban agriculture land. Make sure you think about the bigger picture of urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam rather than just the group you farm with.

In a nutshell, minus all the political and human dynamics, that’s my job. In development jargon, it’s called “engaging stakeholders.”

Do you see why I enjoy my job? :)

Oh wow, the rooster stopped crowing. Maybe I can get a few more hours of sleep…