PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: Food Security in Tanzania
A project with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Sustainable Harvest Specialty Coffee Importers
Opportunity
Our 2007 project in Kigoma, Tanzania with Sustainable Harvest Coffee Company was an unqualified success, resulting in the construction of eight washing stations for coffee processing using water sources characterized and engineered by New England EnviroStrategies. Tangible evidence of that success came in 2010 at the prestigious East African Fine Coffees Association annual competition in Mombasa, Kenya, where coffee from the Kanyovu Coffee Cooperative in Kigoma won first place among all East African coffees.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters of Waterbury, Vermont saw the success of the proven model of developing small scale water supplies in the Kigoma region and wanted to expand the approach to focus on ‘food security’. In essence, Green Mountain wanted to make sure farmers had enough nourishing food to eat, particularly during the May-October dry season when coffee harvesting takes place. 
Sustainable Harvest and New England EnviroStrategies together developed a grant proposal for a two year pilot project designed to improve food security for approximately 5,000 people in the Kigoma region. Funding from Green Mountain provides the impetus for characterizing water sources, engineering cost-effective piping and storage systems, and developing drip irrigation for families to be able to irrigate small plots of land for vegetable growing during the dry season.
How We Helped
Our involvement included:
- sending two New England EnviroStrategies staff to Kigoma, Tanzania in December, 2010 to conduct on-site characterization of water resources in the Kigoma region, visiting over twenty-five water source locations in seven towns;
- producing a water source and irrigation development plan including conceptual engineering design and costs for water transport, storage and application for five irrigation systems;
- providing technical assistance for the construction of the five water storage and transportation systems in Kigoma specifically to support the implementation of micro-irrigation systems;
Unique Project Features
 This project required communication and input among staff from widely disparate locations in Tanzania, Oregon, New Hampshire and Peru. Skype across three continents routinely connected the project team when telephone calls were needed. However, the project team also needed access to field data and mapping information, and that required a slightly different approach.
Site mapping for the project was accomplished with a combination of a Garmin Oregon 500t GPS GPS unit and an LTI TruPulse 200 rangefinder coupled with mapping capabilities of Google Earth. Data from the GPS and rangefinder (including electronically recorded notes) were downloaded in the evening following each field day and emailed to NE2S staff in the United States for processing.
NE2S utilized Google Maps and Google Earth for mapping for the project to take advantage of Google’s up-to-date satellite images and the capacity for any member of the project team, regardless of location, from Kigo, to input and manipulate data, greatly facilitating and speeding the evaluation process.
Results
 Two water systems out of the five were constructed in this first year of the two-year pilot. Irrigation kits provided to participating farmers at cost were installed and operated in the summer of 2011.
The remaining three systems will be built during the 2011-2012 rainy season (November-March) with additional farmers added to the food security project.
PROJECT PHOTOS:
Food Security Water Project: Kigoma, Tanzania
Geology: Low permability, mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones.
Explaining the Rangefinder and GPS.
Measuring spring discharge.
Real-time mapping, analysis with Google Earth.
Water: The vital resource.
A Kigoma hardware store (system design and costing).
The chameleon who didn't...
Ferrocement water storage tank construction.
Completed ferrocement water storage tank.
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