I am treading a sensitive path ,I know. Villages losing their best! So what?
Well, finally, I have settled down on the rural side where I’ve already been for a couple of weeks.With all ordinary folks everywhere , I have enough of them willing to give just about all the information I want.
Walking through a number of small shopping centres, I realize that money exchanges hands here on a very very small scale and rarely (emphasis mine).
As a result,this puts a huge limitation to these farmers’ abilities to send children to better schools,advance to universities and boosting their daily life’s operation costs.
Surely this is good news that money exchanges hands,but support systems to signal that there are better times ahead for growing trade ,activity and more rural opportunity are still weak,to say the least.
As a result,among other issues,trained agricultural experts,extension workers rarely want to return home (in their villages) after being armed with the skills in urban universities . For many, it would be a ‘plus’ to return to move their kin who are rural small scale farmers, toward that direction where every every small scale farmer aspires to be-producing with better crop husbandry modern methods to scale up production-and by extension-earnings.
A number of young Agricultural experts graduate and make way to side work jigs such as urban banks among other business areas outside their expert niche’s.
Such ‘exodus’ of the supposed good rural brains, educated and skilled in this back borne of the country’s economy should raise a major concern.
If our best agricultural ‘ human talent’ are staying away from their rural homes, how is the capacity of the literate and semi literate small scale farmers going to be scaled up?
For a country whose economic backbone, agriculture, has been growing at a bad statistic of 3.5 percent,this is worrying. What incentives, in terms of dependable support systems can be put in place to attract agricultural experts back to their rural home sides to passionately work?
The rural side is not actually alone,as the phenomenon is indeed national and is replicated in majority of Least Developed Countries.A book by Devesh Lapur and John McHale titled Give Us Your Best and Brightest’, he argues that the loss of institution builders – hospital managers, university department heads and political reformers among others could help trap poor countries into a vicious cycle of poverty.
The World Bank (Africa) has already confirmed that its next line of Action would be how to create such support systems,to bolster the incomes of professionals in their home countries.
This will include how to create employment for graduates ,out of current frustrations in both rural and the urban.
Hope is that support systems in rural areas would go far in helping villages like Nyamata in Shinyanga as incentives to reward and retain merit.