The primary school, World Bank and plans for Chamanculo

The last day of the hackathon was quite busy for all of us – the non-SGT members of our group all had one hackathon team to coach and they had the last chance to support their groups to create the pitches that would bring out the full potential of their ideas to the jury. Marja-Reetta Paaso from STIFIMO, Jean Barroca from the World Bank and the local representative of Chamanculo in Maputo municipality governance judged the ideas 5 teams had formed during the past four days. The winners were rewarded with laptops.

Meanwhile we visited a local primary school and did a few interviews.

At the school it took a while to get permission to see the grounds and film there. We waited outside with probably close to a hundred children gathered around us and trying to touch us, especially our hair, and to hold our hands. We were somewhat positively surprised about the school’s facilities after visiting some homes. There was a lot of space, light classrooms with big blackboards and well-behaving kids. The toilets were quite good flushable crouch latrines, except for the lack of cleaning. The kids drank water straight from the tap as they do everywhere, even though it’s not safe. The kids tried to stop us from going into the latrines and were holding their nose as we visited there. It was smelly but it could’ve been worse. Later the school’s director told that the latrines were not cleaned at all – they couldn’t afford it.

The classes had over 50 children, but they were quiet and obeyed the teachers – perhaps due to the sticks the teachers had in their hands. All children didn’t have a school uniform as they couldn’t afford it, but they were still allowed to be there. We didn’t see books but the kids had notebooks and pens. At the school there was a little kiosk canteen where the kids could buy food, but most of them carried a lunch with them to school: mostly popcorn. There was also a small library, but we didn’t take a closer look at that. A teacher that we interviewed seemed very nice and professional. There was also a small cornfield on the grounds. 

Visiting a school in Chamanculo

We also had a chance to talk to the school’s director. There were well over 1000 children going to that school in three shifts during the day. He said that not all the kids around the area come, but there are NGOs that  go around and try to collect everyone. The school also meets with the parents. The school went until 7^th grade, after which the kids could go to a secondary school, but they had to pay for that. The director claimed that many kids continue there. He also thought that Mozambique’s education system was perfect and that he wouldn’t change a thing – did he really think that or did he just say it for being scared of something, is hard to say.

Later we talked to the local representative of Chamanculo. He is elected in a way that the locals can affect – whether it’s a simple vote I’m not sure. He was very proud of Chamanculo, and said that he could even claim that Chamanculo is the capital of Mozambique instead of Maputo. All important people have lived her or have otherwise connections to here. Also he thought that people here have a strong identity of being from Chamanculo and there is a real feeling of a community, which Maputo city doesn’t have. He told that there are plans of urbanizing Chamanculo, and already many things are going forward, for example making land ownership official for the residents. They will build proper roads and ditches and give people real addresses sometime in the future. There are however no plans of building a proper sewage system. They are going to start piloting a service that would collect people’s sewage waste from their toilets manually. Of this I talked more with Orlando, who is working with this project for the World Bank. 

Orlando explained that they are providing companies with a safe manually operated technology to empty the sludge from the latrines, also the traditional latrines and the ones that are located so that they cannot be emptied with a truck. The pilot in Chamanculo should start very soon. He said that he didn’t believe that people would have space to dig new holes, so they would have to empty the current holes, and often that is done in a not very safe of hygienic way. Then the waste is poured into ditches at night – as the man living by the ditch complained a few days ago. So far most people have been able to dig new holes though, as there is only that one ditch in this part of Chamanculo and they don’t dump the waste on the streets. Of course people would have to pay for the service, and it’ll mainly help the “middle class” of Chamanculo. He didn’t believe that dry toilets would work here because of the lack of space.

We also talked to Jean Barroca from the World Bank. He is a consultant and doesn’t live here. He’s in Maputo to develop a participatory monitoring system for solid waste management of, where people could report for example of a missing waste container  by sending a free SMS. He didn’t have too much to say about Mozambique as he’d only been here for a little while. He did say though that in a country like this where lack of trust is an issue, the World Bank is often able to bring together different actors, such as the government, municipality and private sector that otherwise wouldn’t cooperate very well. On Monday he gave a very interesting lecture where he introduced different mobile utilizing solutions for different issues around the world. He also said that according to the UN Habitat, one third of the world’s population is going to live in informal settlements by 2020. This will have major socio-economic and environmental implications. Informal settlements are often high risk sites due to for example flooding and health issues that are present in Chamanculo too.