Till Waenbacht worked in Tanzanian villages for two months, helping to operate a development project that assisted people with AIDS. The transcript for our team's interview with Mr. Waenbacht is below. To jump to different questions, use the links in the sidebar on the left.

Mr. Waenbacht also answered questions regarding education in Tanzania. You can view his answers to those questions here.

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Yes, I was in Tanzania for 2 months, working on a business development project for people living with AIDS. It’s probably the most challenging and rewarding and life-changing thing I’ve done in a very long time. Read More... As an experience, it’s difficult to summarise in a sentence or two, but basically what I would say is that: if you want to help people who are living with AIDS, the best thing is to help locally, on the ground, and to work directly with the people, not for a big organisation that tries to help them from abroad, but really to go there [to Tanzania] and work there.

That’s in a way what I’ve tried to do: go to a village. I was in Northern Tanzania, and I worked with people who are from that village, because they know the people and they know what they need, and tried to provide some external perspective and help, in order to help these people set up small businesses. Then they can then feed their family, have enough money to send their kids to school, get education, and get back into life again. Collapse...

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The biggest causes of poverty... I think the main one is probably education and it’s a vicious circle. Read More... If you don’t have money, you don’t get education, if you don’t get education you won’t gain money. So the question is how do you make sure that people get education. There’s two ways you can start that. One is to educate them and the other is to try to help them make some money. Collapse...

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I think you need solutions that work on different levels. There are different solutions depending on what level you’re working at, and it goes from a local level in very concrete solution to a global solution that is quite abstract. Read More...

I’ve worked with local solutions a little bit. One of the things from my experience where I’ve seen that you can alleviate poverty is by teaching people the basics tools how to make money and how to set up and run a business that is sustainable. I think that is probably the easiest and the best way to help individual families. What happen is that you help them to set up a business and once they know how to run it, they’ll run it even though you may no longer be there. But I think it only works for some people. So the other question is how to alleviate poverty at a global level, and that one I can’t judge. It’s probably something in the area of helping countries provide education for their people, be that with money, with resources, or development help in general.

I think the best and the only way to alleviate poverty is to cover both angles. From the top level, to make sure that you give development help to poor countries so that they can set up program themselves, but also to be covered at the bottom level with some group projects, like the one I’ve tried to work in. Collapse...

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I wouldn’t think that it’s a major topic or major concern really in the area I lived in. They [the people] are all farmers anyway, they all grow some corn, beans, and bananas, and that’s what they eat. Read More... It’s very healthy and it’s a decent diet. At the very low level, because people don’t have anything, they starve but that’s not the case in Tanzania, where people have more or less sufficient food. In Tanzania, the diet is very healthy and I wouldn’t have thought that nutrition was a big theme. Collapse...

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In Tanzania the system used is subsistence farming, which means that all families produce their own food. Read More... They are quite good at that, and they produce enough and do it in a way that can be continued in a sustained manner. Collapse...

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It is one of the countries that is the worst infected with AIDS world-wide. Compared to Africa as a whole, it is very much average. Read More... What you find in Africa is that pretty much every country has a huge AIDS problem. Countries like Kenya or Tanzania have about 10% of people infected. Then you go to countries like Botswana were you have 25% of people living with AIDS.

In the area where I was in the North of Tanzania, near Kilimandjaro, in the villages, there is about a 40% AIDS rate. Almost every second person you meet has AIDS. It is even worse in the villages than it is in the cities. In the cities, they know how to protect themselves and the risk of AIDS is less than in the villages. In the villages, they don’t know what AIDS is about, they don’t know how to protect themselves. So what you typically find, the better the education, the less problem of AIDS you have. Collapse...

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First, I would send every girl and boy to school. Read More...

Second, everyone in every country would be given the means to earn a living for his or her family... because only by doing that will you be able to get education.

My third wish would be a change in the way men and women live together. One of the big problems of AIDS is the imbalance of power between men and women. If women become more powerful and they have a say, to say 'No,' for example, that will decrease the risk of AIDS, and if AIDS goes down then, that will also have an effect on poverty. Collapse...

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Waenbacht, Till. Personal Interview. 4 December 2005.

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