19 January 2014, Dar es Salaam – Parents in Lindi Region of Tanzania are being mobilized to send their children to school and allow them go past secondary school in order to get jobs in the lucrative natural gas industry.
Regional Commissioner (RC), Ludovick Mwananzila said his administration has already teamed up with community and religious leaders, the police force and courts to encourage children including girls to join school and get past secondary school.
“We have come with a strategy to enforce education for children so that residents of this region can benefit from this massive natural gas discovery,” said Mr Mwananzila while addressing representatives of various religions visiting Lindi and Mtwara regions as part of Ministry of Energy and Mineral’s natural gas sensitization study tour.
He said following discovery of natural gas, expectations are high because some people think money or success will fall from the sky like manna.
He said Lindi has huge gas reserves which will be exploited by the government and foreign investors who will need skilled manpower hence the need for people to get educated.
Lindi and Mtwara have much of the 43 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered by several multinationals including Norwegian Statoil, Exxon- Mobile, Ophir Energy and BG Group currently undertaking exploration work offshore the two regions.
Lindi is also a reservoir for one trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserve being extracted at Songosongo islands by Songas Limited which is used in generation of 180 megawatts of electricity.
Mwananzira said already villages at Songosongo are getting an average of 20m/- in services levy from Pan African Energy which is contracted by Songas to undertake gas extraction.
He said several factories including a 750-metric- tonne per day cement factory are being constructed in Lindi which will employ more than 600 people directly while some Chinese investors have shown interest to revive some cashew nut processing factories in Newala.
“We need skilled and educated people to work in these factories but parents here are not encouraging their children to go to school and especially girls,” he noted while requesting religious leaders to help mobilize parents encourage children to like education.
Kilwa District Commissioner (DC), Abdallah Ulega said his district has increased revenue collection from both agriculture commodities and natural gas exploitation.
– Tanzania Daily News
