Follow-up Survey for Research on African Light Manufacturing in Tanzania Conducted

The World Bank is conducting research on industrial policy, especially concerning light manufacturing, to foster non-agricultural industries and income-generating activities in Africa. Keijiro Otsuka and Tetsushi Sonobe of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) are in charge of the field survey and the analysis for this research. Per their request, the JICA Research Institute (JICA-RI) team is assisting with this research, due to their experience gained from the “Empirical Study on Industrial Clusters in Africa” project.

JICA-RI’s Research Associate Yessica Chung, a member of the “World Bank Joint Survey on Light Manufacturing in Africa” research project, visited the former capital of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from September 21 to 28. As part of the project, Chung conducted the training of the surveyors and the pre-test.

In May and June this year, GRIPS’s Otsuka and Sonobe held an improvement (kaizen) training session, targeting the managers of the garment industries clustered in Dar es Salaam and using the questionnaire prepared by GRIPS and the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development (FASID). The objective of Chun’s trip was to conduct a follow-up survey of this training program.

Chung is in charge of training the locally-selected collaborators, who will conduct the survey, and of managing its implementation. She explained the meaning of each question and the definition of the terms used in the questionnaire, and also discussed with them whether the questions on the questionnaire corresponded to the local situation, making adjustments accordingly.

For the pre-test, Chung accompanied the collaborators to the interviews. There were some misunderstandings regarding the interview method, and problems such as skipping some questions or asking contradicting questions, but Chung immediately checked and asked to redo the interview. JICA-RI will work on boosting collaborator training to prevent problems like this.

Looking back on the training and pre-test, Chung concludes that some improvements were made. “The kaizen training provided the garment industry managers with the management know-how to expand their industry. Some decided to invest aggressively in machinery such as sewing machines, some created display rooms for their products, and others started using accounting books to manage monetary flows. It is very interesting to see all these improvements.”

Another training program is planned for the end of this year, and JICA-RI is again planning to participate in its follow-up survey. It is expected that the results of this survey will contribute to the TICAD V (Fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development) planned in 2013.