Madunda

There is no electricity in the rural area of Madunda, in southern Tanzania. This severely limits social services such as education and healthcare and prevents the development of local business. Prysmian is donating technical support and materials to the ACRA project (Associazione di Cooperazione Rurale in Africa e America Latina - Association for Rural Cooperation in Africa and Latin America, www.acra.it) for the construction of a hydroelectric plant on the Kisongo river, for the benefit of the 12,000 local inhabitants. Schools, medical facilities, public offices, small and medium enterprises will finally be supplied with electricity, improving the standard of living in the region and allowing it to escape from a subsistence economy. The process of rural electrification is managed by village committees which have set up the Madunda Electricity Company. Specific training is provided to technicians, who manage the power generation and transportation facilities, and to administrative staff, who manage the electricity company's accounts and finances. Several professional courses have been organised to help bolster the local small and medium enterprises, for example in carpentry and in the use of computers and the internet. The project also seeks to support local reforestation through income-generating activities. In fact, the presence of commercially desirable aboriginal plants, combined with access to a low-cost renewable source of energy in the form of the hydroelectric plant, would make it possible to start silvicultural activities, that could become the region's principal industry in the future.