Neema: Civil engineer on the verge of revolutionising construction industry

We want to bring an alternative and show how we can teach builders and masons how to use it in our communities and bring awareness to it. “Through Dr Alice, we will be able to scout for funding and specialists to work with,” she said.

“We want to work in collaboration with already established factories and companies that deal with construction and chemicals based in Tanzania,” she added.

Apart from the cement plant, they want to venture further into alternative brick and block manufacturing. From perforated bricks and alternative blocks, something that Dr Alice has already initiated.

“These are some opportunities we want to bring to real life,” she mentioned. Making cement and bricks cheaper for everyday Tanzanians.

“The capital investment will be substantial, because we’re thinking about plants, but once it’s being sold to the community, it will be cheaper than the cement being sold now and have less environmental impact in terms of pollution,” she added.

Ms Neema is in her second year as an engineering PhD student; her work is in civil structure material engineering, dealing with the properties, behaviour, and application of materials used in civil structures such as buildings, bridges, roads, dams, etc.

Simply put, she is the doctor who will go around your house, bridges, and all kinds of buildings and analyse the materials used to build them and how they’re being affected by the weather and the salt in the seawater, especially for Dar es Salaam and other coastal constructions, and research their impact on the structure.

So rare are her studies that only three Tanzanian women have that expertise. Her experience would have been crucial in a time like the Kariakoo disaster that claimed lives after a building collapsed.

 At the main commercial hub in the city. She was not in the country at the time, but giving her take, she said none of her peers studied the case in the aftermath of the building collapse; she said normally they would have needed to do a condition assessment to truly understand what took place.

There was a lot of speculation and discussion, but since at that time she was in South Africa doing her master’s degree under the Concrete Materials and Structural Integrity Research Unit (CoMSIRU) at the University of Cape Town, she couldn’t be in a position to physically lend assistance.

Tanzania still lacks technical ability or know-how, normal Civil engineers in Tanzania registered by the Engineer Registration Board (ERB) can’t adequately assess a disaster like the Kariakoo building collapse from the technical aspect, starting with observing the soil the building stood on.

She also shed light on how civil engineering is being taught in Tanzania, where you can only become a civil engineer designing buildings, high-rise and low-rise, or a civil engineer in transportation, where you construct bridges and roads, or a civil engineer dealing with water resources, designing water infrastructures like dams, drainage, sewers, and water sources.

But she said there are other specialities in civil engineering, like geotechnical, that deal with the soils, which are not specialised in Tanzania like the aforementioned three.

All the main universities, like the University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT), the University of Dodoma, and other main universities, do not have the specialisation of geotechnical and civil structure material engineering that she is currently taking in India.

Without that knowledge, you can’t truly have expertise that can effectively analyse the building materials like timber, iron, cement, and more that are used in construction, their durability, where they are sourced from, their reaction to the environment, and more.

“I didn’t even know that one can specialise in civil structure material till I was in my fourth year of study and my professor, who studied in Russian, told me to consider specialising in it,” she said. There is a dire and urgent need to have experts in her field.

“If you look at TanRoads, which oversees all the roads and bridges in Tanzania but does not have civil structure material engineers who specifically observe and inspect the materials used, how they are used, the quality and maintenance of the structure, and rehabilitation,” she noted. “That sparked her interest in studying it,” she added.

In the whole of Africa, only the University of Cape Town offers studies in civil structure material engineering, and that’s where she started before going for her PhD in India.

As she continues to do her research, she comes to understand the magnitude of work they have to do in Tanzania to catch up with world standards in the construction sector.

Most of our building materials in Tanzania are not standardised; when you buy a door for your house, there is no guarantee how long it will last or when you will need to repaint it. Even our ratio in mixing concrete as we build is adapted from the British standards.

In Africa, only Egypt and South Africa have their own standards based on research and experiments done in their countries.  “You can’t build a house in England and Tanzania and use the same standards for concrete mixture, timber, and other materials used, because each country demands a different approach; one country has winter, the other doesn’t.

We have to consider these factors,” she explained. This led her to visit the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS), confirming that, indeed, we do not have the standards specifically for civil engineering.

“It is a process that takes between 20 and 100 years to get the standards because you have to put them to the test in different exposure conditions,” she said.

But they are evaluating to see how they can start that process of standardising Tanzanian materials, working with Dr Alice Titus Bakera and Dr Kabibi Kamashanju, based in Germany.

This is a long-term procedure that needs laboratories and publishing papers of their findings. They will be working hand in hand with TBS, Tanroads, and other essential government institutions.

The three ladies in engineering have an ambitious blueprint for sensitising this knowledge in universities across Tanzania. Looking at partnering with Mbeya University of Science and Technology (MUST) or DIT, which has an excellent laboratory that will be sufficient for their research and experiments.

The current institute she is studying at, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, has a campus in Zanzibar, and they are looking at starting the department of civil engineering materials in Zanzibar as early as next year.

“If three of us can do these types of collaborations with local institutions in Tanzania, that will be a good start,” she said. Ms Neema has so far been able to conduct workshops in Zanzibar, sharing her knowledge with Tanzanian peers in their field. Mostly working within government institutions.

The feedback was amazing, and people wanted to know more about materials, she observed. Participants showed interest, and even from those who didn’t come, she is hoping to conduct more workshops in Dar es Salaam next year.

She is working closely with ERD to make it happen. These workshops will help empower Tanzanian engineers with more knowledge and confidence in their work.

She understands the urge for Tanzanian professionals who choose to study and reside abroad permanently because of better incentives, but she personally wants to come back home and advance her profession at home. Neema is a mentor under an organisation called the Tanzania Women Architects for Humanity (Tawah).

Mentoring many upcoming civil engineers and scholars in her field, she has constantly advised them in developing their soft skills to increase employability.

She understands this too well; as a graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam, she found it challenging to adapt to her work after obtaining her degree.

Although she had aced her studies, she discovered that Microsoft Excel is just as important, a skill she didn’t learn at UDSM. Now she mentors the youth on the importance of soft skills.