Friday Afternoon Meetings

On Friday afternoon, following a very informative meeting with members of the Dochi VICOBA, we met with an environmental engineer named John Mshunju. He is the man who alerted Edith to the flourishing briquetting operations in Lushoto.  He is setting up his own private briquetting enterprise which will offer two products. One is a donut-shaped briquette of the type propagated by Legacy Foundation, made with one of the compound lever presses constructed by the carpenter of the Dochi group.  The other is a solid, cylindrical briquette that closely resembles traditional charcoal. These are made by first carbonizing the waste residues from shoe polish production. This fine material is then combined with a binder and compressed into the final state with a hand operated extruder. He is currently finalizing his business plan.

As the conversation turned to biogas, he offered to introduce us to Peter Jally of the New Rural Children Foundation (NRCF), the implementing partner of the Tanzanian Domestic Biogas Program (TDBP) for the Lushoto area.  Peter indicated that NRCF has built fixed-dome type digesters of up to thirteen cubic meters in size, mainly for farmers and livestock owners.  They build four, six, nine or thirteen cubic meter plants, with CAMARTEC, the organization coordinating the TDBP on a country-wide scale, taking over on any digester larger than that. The actual construction is done by masons specially trained at VETA Tanga (Vocational Educational Training Center in Tanga ), with their pay covered by the Tanzanian government and SNV. The recipient of the plant is responsible for providing the building materials including brick/stone, cement, and any plumbing necessary.   Peter noted that using the slurry exiting the digester as fertilizer has been increasingly promoted in the past year, due to its well-documented superior quality, offering higher levels of available nitrogen than even commercially available fertilizers.  We hope to visit with CAMARTEC next week to continue to learn about the TDBP (and connect with groups interested in the loose biomass stove).

After we finished up the meeting with Peter,  John showed us the offices of an NGO he co-founded, in part with a man named Hande Mwanjela. We met Hande earlier in the day at the briquetting event, as he originally introduced the technology in the area.  He has since done several briquetting trainings across the country (he is slated to do a training in the Kigoma region next month).  Interestingly, he cited fuel availability issues as a contributing factor to the Dochi group’s increased success relative to other parts of the country. Where firewood is still free in many places, expensive charcoal is the most prominent fuel source in the Lushoto area.  This situation parallels the Lulu VICOBA, where a seemingly large fraction of family income is spent on firewood.  Seeing the office gave us a chance to again thank Hande for the time he spent with us in the morning as well as finishing trading contact information with him.