The weather in the Maasai plains of Northern Tanzania is much cooler this time than any other time I’ve been. The landscape is also much greener (apparently I’ve come just at the end of the rainy season), and for once I can see crops and loads and loads of white flowers growing, rather than the …
… in the context of the Service Value Test (SVT), a key tool in the Smart Villages approach which engages community members to uncover their needs and aspirations for the future development of their village. It’s an important early step when we start working with a new community, and the quantitative and qualitative data about …
On the difficulties of transporting solar equipment to remote places Working at Smart Villages, we are very fortunate to work in some incredible locations. One of the most stunning is Kasese district in western Uganda. Located exactly along the equator, dominated by two national parks, and nestling in amongst the breath-taking Rwenzori mountains, the district …
Kiruru sub-village is a small community in the Simanjiro District of Northern Tanzania, and the second of the chosen sites for our SICENT project. Roughly 10km via (very bad) mud road from Terat, the local centre (where our partner organisation OMASI is based), Kiruru is actually administratively part of Oiborkishu village, 7km to the north, …
The Service Value Test (SVT for short) is a key tool in the Smart Villages approach that we like to use as early as possible in our conversations with communities we are looking to work with. We find it really helpful for the following reasons: It gets us quantitative preference data from community members telling …
The Service Value Test – what it is and why we use it Read More »
It’s a long journey from a tiny bean growing in the mountains of Uganda to your first morning cup of coffee in the UK, nearly 7000km away. To learn more about this journey, some SVRG members visited a coffee processing facility funded by the Lutheran World Group near Kasese, Uganda in November, 2020. This facility …
As we remember our friend, Martin Saning’o Kariongi, who passed away this week from coronavirus, we wanted to collect together some of the material that we, and others, have on the internet featuring Martin talking about his work.
While looking through my notes this week hunting some site data for a community in Tanzania that we are working in jointly with our partners OMASI, I found – on the very first pages of my notebook – the notes from our first project meeting, where Martin gave us a little glimpse of his life …
People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things. Sir Edmund Hillary It is with great sadness that we have to share the news that Martin Kariongi, leader of our Tanzanian partner organisation OMASI, but more particularly our friend and colleague from Terrat, passed away in the morning of 1st March …
It seems a long time since we were with our partners Chemolex in Nairobi in February of 2020, exploring different river sites for this project. The COVID lockdowns in both the UK and Kenya, and restrictions on international travel, have made progress much harder for us. It is with pride though, that we see the …
Removing Plastic from Kenya’s Rivers – Year 1 Report Read More »
As part of the Education Technology Project we ran in 2021, we worked closely with a local secondary school for running focus groups and user tests. It is eye-opening seeing the conditions the students live in, when you compare it with what we have in England. Most students live too far away to walk in …
As part of our project with Clear Sky Power and Energy Action Partners in Somaliland, we ran Service Value Tests (more here) in the three focus communities for the project. The aim was to help us get to know them a bit better, understand their needs and priorities, and so design the COMET toolkit to …
The SVRG approach is grounded in community engagement and human centred design, to ensure the systems we install bring real, lasting benefit. Unfortunately, due to language barriers, we are unable to run focus groups ourselves, but rely on our in-country partners to assist with translation, or with running the entire group following training. Our translators …
Language and Education Barriers in Community Engagement Read More »
A video showing some highlights from our most recent trip to Uganda, aiming to give you a flavour of our everyday work out on the field.
Many of the communities we work with are agricultural, with maize flour contributing to an integral part of their diet. In the rural Maasai Tanzanian communities we work with, villagers often have to travel miles to neighbouring towns to access a diesel milling machine. Once there, they can face long waiting periods for sufficient customers …
We’re pleased and immensely proud to announce that Natasha Wilson, one of our development engineers who joined in July 2020, has been awarded the Institute of Mechanical Engineer’s (IMechE) Scholarship Visionary Award 2020, for her drive to use engineering as tool for positive change and development. Here’s her acceptance video, filmed in Uganda on the …
Something we realised during our most recent trip to Uganda, is the importance of timing visits according to the seasons and political rallies. This personal recount is adapted from notes written during the trip: 19/11/2021 Just as we arrived in Kampala, we found out there’d been protests following the arrest of Bobi Wine, a presidential …
A Personal Recount of Challenging Travel through Heavy Rains and Political Campaigns Read More »
Solar panel systems can be expensive and time-consuming to build. They can require specialist knowledge to set up, and be difficult to maintain. In rural communities, it can make a huge difference if a solar panel system can be made simply and at a lower cost. That’s why Smart Villages is always on the lookout …
On our most recent trip to Tanzania, the number of half-fallen trees was quite noticeable. I thought nothing of it at first, even though several of them were lying across the roads. They could have been damaged in storms? That was until we realised that they were all under newly erected grid electricity lines. The …
Although our first solar installation in rural Tanzania has been having overwhelmingly positive reviews by the local community (powering the local water borehole, the first fridge in the local shop, and a small, efficient, electric milling-machine) we still have a hard time explaining the concept of solar power to some of our other target communities. …