Women Development for Science and Technology Association

June 28, 2013

Today I went to WODSTA (Women Development for Science and Technology Association), an NGO in Njiro Hill, which is a growing middle class section of Arusha.  “Equitable social development that recognizes empowering the poor, particularly women, to utilize environment resources as a necessary foundation for sustainable development.”  WODSTA was started in 1990 and works in women’s economic empowerment, environmental conservation, appropriate technology, sustainable development, food security, alternative energy, and civic/land rights.  In the last ten years, they have also focused on food processing and marketing through added value products (e.g. preserving surplus harvest).  They started training in fruits and vegetables with a project focused on mangos for which women began processing organically-grown mangos and turning them into jam and mango “pickle” (a spicy relish with chili and spices).  Since I love love love mangos, I ended up buying a jar of the pickle and chutney.  While at WODSTA, I also learned about their alternative energy project, which involved making industrial-sized stoves out of bricks. 

They are trying to move away from the three stone, open fire model, which although traditional, it is wasteful in firewood and inefficient in heating.  As I may have previously mentioned, energy is a gendered issue because women are typically responsible for gathering firewood and fuel, and now with increased competition over scarce land from wildlife conservation, climate change, etc., women have been forced to buy firewood.  WODSTA’s goal is to reduce the workload for women with an emphasis on locally available material.  They are proponents of solar water heaters, solar dryers, and the improved stove technologies.  They’ve been working on the stoves for almost one year now and hope to install them in community centers such as schools and health clinics, rather than individual homes.  In addition, the secretary general explained how WODSTA is taking a stand on women’s land rights by working with pastoralist communities in the realm of land-use conflict resolution (e.g. with national parks, foreign investors, government officials).  They have a pilot project operating in seven nearby villages to educate women on land rights, inheritance laws, and other challenges related to property.  I hope that I can join them on a field visit sometime this month, as the issue of land grabbing is of deep interest to me. 

I took a processing tour during which I saw the receiving, storing, and processing rooms/facilities (including grinders, washing and drying schemes, and packaging material) for the mango project.  I also learned that WODSTA doubles as the partner organization with which Helen operates Slow Food - A Thousand Gardens initiatives.  It was interesting to visit this organization because it allowed me to compare my previous experience with AVRDC.  I hadn’t realized how much the two would differ, as AVRDC is an international organization that is extremely well-funded in comparison to WODSTA, which is a locally-based grassroots organization.  They suffer from financial constraints such as printing colored brochures, which obviously limits their capacity to make change.