Project News

My role of organizational capacity development is based on the concept of accumulating skills and knowledge of an organization to the organization. The organizaitonal capacity develoment aims to standardize operations as giving appropriate training to individuals.

A situational analysis was the first task along with the on-going baseline survey. I visited offices in the Chamwino and Iringa districts and Dodoma and Iringa regions and interviewed technicians and engineers. I also visited the sites where roads were to be maintained. My first impression was that the engineers and technicians were doing as much as possible with limited resources: The budget was limited; the number of vehicles was limited; staff was limited. Training on basic PC, lack of basic information such as road network maps, road maintenance data and information management are some of the major and common challenges for all organizational units.

I also reviewed documents on road maintenance works. Some of the initial findings were: 1) manuals related to road maintenance were not used as much as they should have been; the manuals exist but copies of those manuals are not available to those technicians who needed for their daily tasks; 2) The Road Act has not been updated since 2007; the list of roads was outdated; 3) The data on road condition and structure were manually calculated and summarized.

Major procedures would be improved or automated with information management technology; how the staff in the districts, regions and PMO-RALG would be able to maintain new or improved procedures is a challenging task as they learn to improve themselves as they analyze themselves. A learning organisation with a feedback system is a model I had in mind, but how to apply the concept to challenging situation was yet to be found. The bright side was that almost all the staffs in Tanzania were willing to accept changes to improve their operation unlike common oppositions to changes seen in other countries.

(Kazunobu Kamimura/ RMSD Capacity Development Expert)

Iringa Site Visit

Recording Road Conditions for Assessment

Interviewing Technicians (Chamwino District)