My assignment, the rural community development officer

Last week, I went to the office and understood a little bit of what I am doing in those two years.
On 16th Feb 2012, I was dispatched to DCDO, District Community Development Office, in Mzimba District.
Basically, it seems I can do anything for the livelihood improvement if my ideas are based on any of them below.

1. Community Mobilization
To let the each group in each village work efficiently.
In Malawi, we call the groups CBO (Community Based Organization ??).
According to a JICA staff in Mzimba, CBO started when the Malawian government decided to aid financially for HIV/AIDS. CBO is the unit to take the fund and other aid from the governments and international organization. If any aid, we can just support and send the stuf f or fund to each CBO.
In each CBO, there is a CDA ( Community Development Assistant) who is the contact person with the relief organizations. As the rural community development officer, I coordinate the periodic meeting with all the CDA in Mzimba south.
l Mzimba is the huge district, so I am in charge of southern part. My batch mate must be PIC in northern part in Mzuzu. Luckily, on 2nd Mar, we are going to hold the meeting with all CDA. They will bring the reports to explain the problems they have. I will attend it and see what I can do the
community mobilization.

2. Capacity Building
To deepen the knowledge of socio economics.
To make the management ability of CBO stronger, appointing the leader.

3. Economic Empowerment
To aim at promoting access to credit facilities, like group saving and book keeping.

4. Food Utilization and Dietary Diversification
To introduce Moringa which is the plant which has a lot of nutrition with its fruit and leaves, originally from India. For example, we can make the Moringa powder and put it in the pancake or scorn. It can be connected to IGA (Income generative activity) to introduce the new products.

* In Japan, we can purchase the Moringa products in body shop.
ex) Body butter and bubble bath which is my favorite!! Smells sooooo nice!!!


Reviewing my experience so far, I think I can help them with 1.and 3. In my ex company in shipping industry, I used to make the annual budget and its periodic monitoring every three months .

Apart from economic empowerment, I don’t really have the specific skill with myself. What I can do is to add new idea as Japanese to the project which Malawian people make. It is not to mention that the main actors are Malawian themselves,under the spirit of self-reliance.

In my office, my colleagues are four male officers and one female secretary. The top person had taken the JICA training in Tsukuba, Japan for two months in 2007 or so. So he says he wants me to help Malawian people with the spirit of Kaizen (改善) which is famous with TOYOTA, haha!

Regarding the concrete projects, I have not ready to mention here yet coz I really don’t know what projects are going on precisely even though I have some information from my predecessor. In addition, last week I went out for the field trip and attended the meeting of one group about the group saving just once for each. From this week on, I can know what I am going to do gradually.