Social movements in Tanzania – maybe they are actually out there?

The analysis of civil society in Tanzania, leaves a general picture of a civil society still in the mushrooming stage, however with a few very capable Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) now emerging. However, a big dilemma is the apparent widening gap between the “capable few” and the rest. And another dilemma is the fact that very few CSOs in Tanzania seems to be based on a solid social foundation or constituency – there is, in other words, a very weak tradition of social movements (something which seems a general phenomenon in Sub Sahara Africa, but especially so in Tanzania), as compared to e.g. countries in Latin America.

In a dialogue with Prudence Kaijage, Principal at MS/TCDC, this issue also came up. Prudence agreed in principle with the above analysis of civil society; however he suggested a novel approach to what could be seen as potent civil society movements.
Maybe – he suggested - we need to look more for some of the informal social movements that exist, but which would never access funding, because of the informal character.
He mentioned as an example the ‘busdrivers association’ in Dar es Salaam, who managed very effective to mobilize all the drivers, after a court case against a fellow-driver was conceived as grossly unfair. The driver had been sentenced 30 years to jail for his involvement in a fatal traffic incident, involving two killed persons, as compared to a similar case a minister had been involved in earlier, from which the minister walked free.
Prudence point was to highlight that there are actually social movements in Tanzania, and they have the capacity to mobilize and act. However, they have a very different nature as compared to all the criteria’s in civil society funding guidelines! So he wanted to raise the discussion, whether it would be possible to look at such movements a potential area of civil society support.

This would be a challenge to donors (and northern CSO partners…)! But it might be worth a consideration?

Visit to organisations supported by Foundation for Civil Society

Last Thursday I was given the opportunity to join Foundation staff into the field to visit some of the grantees (as they call the organisations receiving funds). The objective is to follow up on current project progress, and to discus possible challenges facing the implementation of the projects.
We went to villages around Kibaha (outside Dar es Salaam), and as the picture on the left shows, it is no an area entirely unknown to donors!

I was a good learning experience, which gave me a good insight into the capacity and types of activities being conducted.
Some of my observations were:
A. Some organisations are of a very grassroots nature, and therefore with a very limited capacity. It is a challenge how to assist these organisations to move form the basic level of organising one project, and to be a more formalised organisation.
B. Therefore presence of FCS staff to do facilitation and capacity building seems crucial. However, it is a giant task to cover all grantees.
C. Foundation seems to reach organisations which would otherwise find it difficult to assess funding.

It was a very good day in the field. We had time for reflection on a number of issues, such as the challenge of using LFA among inexperienced organisations, mobilising organisations to work with M&E, simplifying application formats and a lot more! The issues are not very different from our Danish debate, it seems!

A note on CIVICUS CSI study in Tanzania

Finding studies of civil society are still difficult to get in Tanzania. Most studies are donor-motivated documents giving an overview of the sector.
The CIVICUS Civil Society Index (CSI) could be one of the approaches to fill that gap. In Tanzania there has been an initial process of conducting such a study. In 2007 the Tanzanian CSO “ForDIA” (www.fordia.org) won a tender to be the agency to initiate and coordinate the process.
They received funding from UNDP to participate in CSI-training at CIVICUS in South Africa and conduct the initial processes in Tanzania.
However, the process has come to a stand still, because of lack of funding. UNDP was expected to be the likely funding agency of the actual study, but have not been able raise the funds needed.
It seems still relevant for civil society to have such a study done, since data on the status of CS are so scarce.
Foundation for Civil Society is planning to do a yearly “Status of Civil society-report” based on the data that are available to them because of their close contact and links to CSOs in general.