Rugs in Tanzania
In the 1980s the first “Habitat for Humanity” initiative on the continent was launched. To attract Kenyan women to work, the first three Habitat districts were expanded one by one and three by three. The first new community was discovered in the city of Mukiltei, about five miles into the Congo River, a UNESCO World Heritage Site the day before it was sealed off and closed.
Muduganda, an isolated region of rural poverty and high crime rates, was built in 1960 to support the local poor. By 1980, more than 30,000 people worked on the project, according to the NGO Habitat.
“The Mukiltei community has become an important resource in terms of the livelihoods of thousands of workers,” the local minister, Lillie Whela, told me in 2007. “So we now need to be better prepared to cope with the growing number of migrants.”
A third Habitat district was discovered in 1994 on its former home, which was now part of a forest project. As a result, its residents had to leave it within six months. That allowed the government to build a new village on it, to accommodate a further 1,000 inhabitants.
In 1994, a new development scheme began to open on this site. A large number of people from nearby communities started to flock there, but were prevented from doing so after the government refused to provide an immediate housing allowance
Rugs in Tanzania were “very much on the rise”, and they were “quite large, maybe as much as 20”. The group had been struggling in several African countries for many years.
“Africa will experience more crises once again on this continent: we might find ourselves in one of a host of countries. We will have to deal with all these kinds of pressures from other places, to the US and to the EU,” he said.
The BBC’s Philip Harrison with Gabriela Wenda agrees that the situation has got worse for Africa, and says many of the same issues of instability were faced in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I would put the world on the brink now of famine, I’ve warned many times and heard many voices on the global stage in response to what happened,” he says.
But his country was, “still quite an uncertain place at this time and our response in the early 30 years was to fight it with all the strength and resources available.”
One of their leaders, the former president of a big French gas company, and an African leader of French steel manufacturing, said he was pleased they were fighting the problem.
Rugs in Tanzania
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On the continent
