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Strong willpower is necessary to defeat poverty - Japanese development

Strong willpower is necessary to defeat poverty - Japanese development
By Mutuna Chanda
Friday May 09, 2008 [04:00]

A STRONG willpower to defeat poverty is necessary for development, a Japanese development expert has observed. And Dr Kenneth Kaunda has said HIV/AIDS will be easy to defeat if poverty is eradicated. And Japanese Ambassador to Zambia Hideto Mitamura has said it is important for local people to take charge of donor-supported projects to enable them to continue after donors have pulled out.

In an interview on Wednesday, after the commemoration of the Participatory Village Development in Isolated Areas (PaVIDIA) day in Chongwe's Kalimansenga village, Takahiro Miyoshi observed the differences in the willpower between the Japanese during their times of underdevelopment and that of present day Zambians.

PaVIDIA is a Japanese government-supported project in collaboration with the Zambian government that promotes sustainable agriculture through the active participation of locals.

Miyoshi is chief advisor in village development of PaVIDIA.
"Japan used to be very poor but our ancestors had a very strong willpower," Miyoshi said. "So willpower is necessary for development. Unfortunately, in Zambia, currently because of the long history of colonialism there is so much of a dependency syndrome among the people but this is beginning to change when you compare with the time we started working on the PaVIDIA project in 2002."
Miyoshi said the mindset of people had changed from the time the project was introduced in various villages.

"When we started the PaVIDIA project, people used to think they were so poor but now there is a paradigm shift and they no longer think that they are poor," Miyoshi said.

However, he said Zambia needed to improve on its infrastructure to support the development of rural areas.

"Infrastructure will be necessary to encourage development because now resulting from poor roads, people can produce but may not be able to sell because they can't get a good market," said Miyoshi. "Also more schools are needed for people to learn and hospitals for healthcare."

And Dr Kaunda encouraged the villagers of Kalimansenga to work hard in the agriculture projects that the Japanese government was supporting.

"There's no more effective way of defeating poverty than working hard," said Dr Kaunda.

Ambassador Mitamura said the Japanese government had committed around US$4.5 million since 2002 to the PaVIDIA projects reaching out to over 56,491 villagers in four provinces in the country.

"In a typical case, financial and technical assistance has been provided for such activities as drilling of boreholes, training of instructors in the maintenance of boreholes, purchase of hammer mills, provision of two cows per village for animal draught power as well as facilitating the provision of building materials for food storage and community meeting facilities," said Ambassador Mitamura. "The project is meant to encourage villagers to exercise ownership of their development initiatives with relatively reasonable funds as start up capital.

The greatest merit of the project is that Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives staff are trained on how to manage the project so that it can continue to run even after the termination of support from the government of Japan."

Labels: DEVELOPMENT, JAPAN

posted by MrK @ 2:44 AM