[kictanet] Making Sense of our development

[bitange at jambo.co.ke]

Listers,
I very much know that my post today is not directly ICT but its
implications have a great bearing on the decisions we make about our
future development in ICT.

Page 19 of the Star of Thursday, October 11th, carried a story on Water
Hyacinth titled “Water hyacinth project threatened by court order”.  This
is apparently a donor funded project in its phase two under Lake Victoria
Environmental Management Project (LVEMP).

LVEMP  II is an eight-year US$254 million (Ksh. 2.1 billion) old regional
project being implemented in the five East African Community partner
states says the article.  Objectives of the project include:  improving
“collaborative management of trans-boundary natural resources of Lake
Victoria basin” as well as “reduce environmental stress in the targeted
pollution hotspots and selected degraded sub-catchment areas as a way of
improving the livelihoods of communities who depend on the lake basin’s
resources”.

One will hope that the project is supposed to physically remove water
hyacinth from the lake to enable the people access the resources from the
lake.  However, in the past eight years the spread of this water menace
has more than tripled and this is what prompted me we to re-examine the
objectives as stated. If these objectives were to be re-stated in
simplified English, the real meaning could be to help citizens of East
Africa understand how to collaborate and manage their resources as well as
reduce their stress.  The project therefore has nothing to do with water
hyacinth and hence the reason why the people are fighting over it.

If the donor language were to be simpler, they would have thought about
project sustainability in which case we did not need all the resources
that is at the disposal of the fighting citizens.  In my view we needed
only US$50 (US$10 million for each country) to set up an organic
fertilizer factory.  Hyacinth has been found to be a good ingredient for
organic fertilizer.  Just recently I wrote a blog how soil nutrients have
been depleted in densely populated districts with excessive land
sub-divisions.  Studies also show productivity levels dropping
significantly that our food security and safety is at its worst threat.

Further, chemical fertilizer may be poisoning our ground water and may be
likely the cause of increased cancer cases in the region.  There is
greater urgency than ever before that we exploit every opportunity for
developing organic fertilizer like hyacinth that would improve on
productivity, ensure sustainable development and reduce its impact on our
water resources.  Our problems would only be solved by us and as such
foreign interventions will not always be a universal remedy to our
predicament.

Ndemo.