A Bleak Chapter in Nordic Development Aid History?: the Nordic Co-operative Assistance Project in Tanzania

Abstract

In the late 1960s a Joint Nordic Co-operative Assistance Project was established in Tanzania. Its objective was to promote co-operative development in Tanzania based on Nordic experiences in the field. The project's effort to export Nordic co-operative ideas and traditions to Tanzania soon encountered major problems as the Government of Tanzania (GoT) launched a villagization process in the beginning of the 1970s, which sought to move the entire peasant population into ujamaa villages. The resettlement effort was implemented with the use of force and coercion and implied a dismantling of the traditional co-operative structures in Tanzania. This article finds that the Nordic countries helped facilitate GoT's compulsory policy by adjusting and restructuring the project to GoT's villagization strategy, despite the fact that the primary objective of the project was no longer present. As the article will reveal, there was a clear concern in the Nordic aid administrations that the Nordic project could be linked with the politics of coercion ingrained in the ujamaa policy.