Mid-term evaluation of the village environmental improvement project, Singida, Tanzania

Mid-term evaluation covers the period 4/81-9/83 and is based on site visits and interviews with project and government personnel and with beneficiaries. The technology originally proposed to achieve project goals - windmills, water storage tanks, cement granaries, buried pot and trickle irrigation systems, and community woodlots - proved technically and financially infeasible, leading to a 1983 project revision. The current strategy, which has excited the imagination of the participants, focuses on: (1) improving water supply through self-help construction of shallow wells equipped with hand pumps; (2) training villagers in vegetable gardening techniques and nutrition, and supplying seeds and implements; and (3) introducing afforestation at primary schools to provide fruit, pole, and fuelwood trees to villages. Each component includes training aimed at institutionalizing the activities, and government officials and technicians are already involved in most project areas. The project staff - a director assisted by Peace Corps and other volunteers on a part-time basis (the staff is currently being expanded to satisfy the project's varied and widespread demands) - has links with over 80 government, church, and local officials. Progress in establishing infrastructure has been slow due to difficulties in obtaining import permits, recruiting staff, and constructing buildings. Additional problems include the harshness of the region and Tanzania's weak national economy. However, the project is now well underway and promises considerable long-term impact due to the appropriate and replicable nature of its technologies. An 18-month extension is recommended to enable the 36-48 targeted wells to be completed and the gardening and afforestation programs to be adequately institutionalized. Lessons learned are, inter alia: (1) windmills are not appropriate for village self-help and should be reserved for areas where deep borehole wells are used and a built-in maintenance capacity exists; (2) multipurpose cement ring technology is not functional; (3) volunteer recruitment was delayed due to lack of project proposal specificity on this point; (4) implementation has been made unnecessarily complex by the choice of such widely scattered villages and by the lack of a local LWR staff person.