The Construction Industry is an essential contributor to the socio-economic development process of any country. The Industry has as its customers, virtually every industry, public or private sector organizations and even households; if not for new constructions then for repair and maintenance either through the formal or the informal sector. Since independence there have been a number of initiatives geared towards fostering the local construction industry. Despite such interventions, the state of the local construction industry has remained poor. Performance constraints include inadequate capacity of local contractors and consultants, erratic work opportunities and poor state of the economy. Tanzania is now embarking on a long-term development strategy that aims at achieving sustainable human resources development. The Consultants and Contractors Involvement Component (CCIC) of the Road Sector Support Programme (RSSP) is in its third year of implementation (July 2002 - June 2003). This is a Civil Engineering Consultants and Contractors development programme, financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and Tanzania Roads Agency (TANROADS). For ownership and sustainability reasons, two trade Associations manage the programme, where the Association of Consulting Engineers Tanzania (ACET) manage Consultants Training, the Tanzania Civil Engineering Contractors Association (TACECA) manages the contractors training. The programme is also having a Supporting Agent (SA) who is having an advisory role. There is a Steering Committee composed of all big Stakeholders, which oversees the programme. Contractors go through classroom training, demonstration phase (5 weeks) and Trial contract phase; So far 79 Contractors have been trained in gravel road works and 14 in bridge and river training works. The National Construction Council (NCC) is the appointed trainer for contractors. Consultants are exposed to the full cycle of main activities, i.e. conducting studies design and then supervision. All three stages include classroom and field training. 25 Engineers from 11 firms have gone through gravel road works training and 15 senior engineers from 9 firms and 3 from the roads agency have undergone bridge and river training works, training. The trainees gained confidence, which is the most positive result of CCIC. Most of them managed to stabilize their companies; some even managed to employ more permanent staff and purchased at least some basic equipment. SDC and TANROADS are ready to finance another phase to consolidate the acquired benefits. This paper gives in brief the organisational structure of the programme and some good and bad lessons learnt. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Abstract