Regional Seminar Proceedings 1990

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE SEMINAR

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The seminar was conducted in the Karibuni Centre, Mbeya, Tanzania and took place over three days from 26 to 28 February 1990.

The seminar was organised and chaired by the ILO Regional Adviser for Labour-Based Road Technology, Mr David Stiedl, on behlaf of all practitioners in the technology in Eastern Southern Africa.

1.1.1 THE PURPORSE OF THE SEMINAR

As stated in the title, the purpose of the seminar was to review current practice by gathering together the experts and practitioners in the field. All participants were engaged in working on labour-based roads projects in east and Southern Africa. The aim was therefore to have an active exchange of ideas and information based on the participants ' experience in the region and also to draw on their previous experiences in other areas. A list of participants is given in Annex 2 of this report.

The increased emphasis on the use of local resources for infrastructure programmes in developing countries has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of projects adopting labour-based technology. There is now a pressing need to review and disseminate information on the various techniques which have been adopted to ensure that new and existing projects have the opportunity to modify or update their procedures to make optimum use of the labour-based approach.

Each programme should be able to learn from the problems, successes and failures of other programmes which will assist in the choice of methods of construction,management, planning etc. Also by discussing common problems, solutions or suggestions for further study could be made.

1.1.2 FORMAT OF THE SEMINAR

In order to spark off the active exchange of ideas, several participants had been approached to present short topic papers, the topics having been chosen to cover the principal areas of concern as expressed by practitioners in the region.

The topics covered the areas of:

• Low cost structures
• Control of alignment
• Haulage of materials
• Self help
• Light equipment
• Training materials
• Maintenance
• Worker motivation
• Monitoring and control

The detailed programme is outlined in this report in Annex 1 - Seminar Agenda.

Each topic presentation was followed by a discussion period and where applicable the production of an Action Plan to specify follow-up required from the participants.

The Action Plans are included in the relevant topic sections and summarised in Annex 3 of this Report.

1.2 STRUCTURE OF THIS REPORT

This report will consider each subject separately. The topic papers are presented in Volume I whereas the subsequent discussion are reported in Volume II including any conclusions or agreed plans of action. The final section - "Summary and Open Discussions - Where do we go from here?" looks at the proposals made at the seminar for the future exchange ideas and experiences.

Although the report is presented in two volumes, Volume I and Volume II should be read concurrently.

The plans of action are structured on the following basis:

1.3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The ILO would like to thank all the participants for attending and their programmes for allowing them to be released. We hope that the knowledge gained more than compensated for their absence.

We would also like to thank the staff for the Regional Road Maintenance (RRM) in Tanzania for providing so much assistance to the seminar in Mbeya, the staff of the Special Public Works Programme in Dar es Salaam for all their preparatory and logistic support, and Ms. Ritchie and Mr. Selvarasa for recording the discussions.

We would like to thank the Governement of Tanzania and the Mbeya Regional Authorities for allowing us to hold this seminar.

Lastly, we would like to apologise to all those we were not able to invite to this, our first seminar in the region. We will try to widen the coverage for the next, and would be pleased to hear from those who would be interested in attending.