Capacity building in East Africa

MS's training centre, TCDC, is found east of Arusha, close to Mount Meru, and 1200 meters above sea-level.

THE MS TRAINING CENTRE for Development Co-operation in Arusha, Tanzania, offers courses in management and capacity building, popular participation, and lobbying and advocacy work. A number of the participants work for MS partners in Africa.

MS-TCDC is instrumental in preparing Danish development workers for their stay in Africa through a four-week long compulsory course. The center also offers Swahili courses to interested organizations in East Africa. Every year, MS-TCDC also holds regional conferences on globalization, good governance, and the political role of NGOs.

Special award to course participant

Many of the courses aim to enable development organizations to involve the local communities in their projects. In 2003, the leader of the Tanzanian organization Envirocare won a prestigious South African NGO award for her effective work on poverty eradication in northern Tanzania.

The award recipient, Lois Lema, explained that the organization’s approach of including both men and women in all aspects of the decision-making process stemmed from a course on Popular Participation at MS-TCDC, which she and other colleagues had attended some years earlier.

MS-TCDC housed a total of 1,700 people in the course of 2004. Photo: Emira Mesanovic.

Helping small-scale tea farmers

Every year, MS-TCDC offers two standard and a number of tailor-made courses on policy advocacy. These courses enable the participants to analyze political processes, and to effectively plead their own cause, or that of others.

The center also arranges conferences and courses on specific topics that deal with advocacy, e.g. children’s rights and the livelihood of pastoralists. One participant from the organization PEDS, attending the course on policy advocacy, wanted to enable the small-scale Kenyan tea producers to obtain better prices from the middlemen.

According to PEDS, one of the problems is that the Tea Board of Kenya is corrupt and is run in such a way that it only considers the interests of the middlemen. Using the methods introduced in the course, PEDS was able to approach a member of the Kenyan parliament, who is also on the Tea Board of Kenya. He is now pleading the cause of the small-scale tea farmers.