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Showing posts from November, 2017

Some Safari Photos!

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I am now back in Dar es Salaam and presented my final report/exit debriefing to the staff here this morning. It went well and we had a good conversation. It has been an amazing experience here. Last weekend I managed to do a safari in Ruaha National Park. It was difficult because I had limited time and the park was about 10 hours away from Mbeya. At the time I didn't realize quite how far it was but bad roads and traffic can really prolong the drive. I ended up going to the park with my city counterpart and his friend, going in his friend's car. This was a considerably cheaper option than going with an official tour company. We left around noon on Friday and drove most of the day. We arrived in the town of Iringa that evening and stayed there. At 5am the next day we left for the park but it took around 4 hours to get to the park because the road was really bad and our little car had to go slowly. As we were getting close to the park but not yet in it we saw a monkey run acr...

Last Day in Mbeya

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The last week has been very busy. On the 13th and 14th we held public private dialogues which had great participation. I completed some other interviews and then frantically worked on getting my report done. The report gives and assessment of the waste situation, recommendations for improvements, and strategies to achieve those improvements. My report, along with my notes from all the meetings, site visits, and interviews, is almost 70 pages single spaced. It's been a lot to pull together. Now I just need to fix up my works cited page, create a table of contents, and do some general editing. This morning I presented my assessment and recommendations to the city officials and it went very well. I did a short Powerpoint presentation and I went through the chart or recommendations in the report. It seemed like they were very interested in some of the ideas. We have formed a small implementation team of both public and private sector representations to look at the recommendations and...

Site Visits!

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The last four days have been busy and informative. My counterparts have continued to bring me to visit waste producers, processors, and collectors to consult on their operations, challenges, and goals. Monday morning we visited a recycling processing business that purchases hard plastics, grinds the material, and melts and molds it to produce kitchen goods such as bowls and containers, as well as toys. The material collected is sorted by color in order to make various colored products. This is a new company and still has some issues. They plan to expand the business to manufacture irrigation pipes, sewage pipes, and crates. This company is located in an industrial warehouse area where each company rents its space. The space next door had rice husks scattered around on the ground. When we commented on this, they informed us that this space had machines to produce charcoal out of rice husks! We were very excited to hear this, considering the challenge of the rice husk byproduct, so ...

Week One in Tanzania

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These posts describe my time in Tanzania, volunteering on a solid waste planning project through the USAID Feed the Future program. The main goals of my project is to facilitate public private dialogue related to policies and regulations for solid waste management. It is also to enhance the capacity of the private sector to be involved with waste management, including collection and processing.  My first week in Tanzania is going very well!  I spent Monday and Tuesday in Dar es Salaam in orientation at the ENGINE office (the project I’m working for) meeting the staff and learning about the overall project. My component of the project is focused on growth-enabling policies and building the relationship between the private and public sector in setting and implementing policies. For my particular project, I'm looking at policies related to waste management and working with businesses in the trash field.  The first few days were challenging because I was very tired,th...