Author: MARY RAMADHANI
AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MIT) has equipped people from industrial clusters with knowledge and skills in a bid to enhance productivity in industries.
Through this initiative, more than 90 people drawn from different industrial clusters attended a sensitization seminar aimed at increasing competitiveness of Tanzanian industries.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MIT) has been implementing the Project on Strengthening Manufacturing Enterprises through Quality and Productivity Improvement (KAIZEN).
The project has gone hand in hand with the Cluster Development Support Project, through the Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO).
According to a statement provided by JICA, it reveals that the three parties of JICA, MIT, and SIDO have combined the two projects to provide KAIZEN service to Industrial Clusters for the purpose of disseminating its movement and increasing competitiveness of the industries in the country.
“The parties have organized sensitization seminars for the clusters aiming at introducing three KAIZEN tools, namely ‘5S’ (workplace organization by Sorting, Setting in order, Shining, Standardizing, and Sustaining); ‘Muda-dori’ (waste elimination), and ‘Why-why analysis’ (root-cause identification),” read part of the statement.
Starting in Dodoma and Morogoro, and conducted in small groups of people due to the novel coronavirus, such seminars will also be rolled out to Mbeya region.
The seminar was conducted by KAIZEN trainers from the Tanzania Kaizen Unit (TKU) of MIT, SIDO, and the private sector, where different Industrial Clusters attended it to acquire knowledge about KAIZEN techniques, reiterated the statement.
It further revealed that they will be followed up by in-depth training and on-site consulting at a few companies selected from the cluster members as pilot sites.
Morogoro is ahead of other clusters and started accepting individual KAIZEN consulting service at selected pilot companies from late June 2020, revealed the statement.
KAIZEN which originally means ‘Improvement’ is a management philosophy and knowhow for continuous quality and productivity improvement of concerned organizations, explained the statement.
It also elaborated that it is also a human-oriented approach fostering teamwork, mindset change, self-reliance, creativity and ingenuity to come up with ideas for solutions to problems faced in the country.
The statement also explained that, ‘Industrial Cluster Development’ is an approach which aims to drive industrialization by taking advantage of clustering, grouping geographically proximate and interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field.
