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Hunting Technical Services (HTS), with a
professional staff of 100, is the largest
British-based natural resources and rural
development consultancy. It has carried out well
over 1,000 projects in over 130 countries.
David Potten, the present managing director,
first came across it in Makalle, Northern Ethiopia,
where he went with his wife to visit a friend. They
found themselves in the midst of a hair-raising
civil war. (A British vet was captured in the area
and not seen for 12 months.)
They put up at the Castle Hotel where the only
other guests were rural development specialists
from HTS, a company he at the time knew nothing
about. These specialists were developing techniques
for farming in a very marginal area, techniques
which the present, post-civil-war Ethiopian
government is keen to learn about. “I decided,” he
says, “that they were a dedicated group I’d be
happy to work with.”
HTS grew out of Hunting Surveys which decided in
1953 that its aerial photographs could be put to
other uses such as vegetation, land use and land
capability surveys. A Cambridge researcher, Vernon
Robertson, was appointed “to carry out the duties
of an ecologist but also duties not normally
undertaken by an ecologist.”
In Burma, HTS pioneered irrigation from
underground water, establishing what is still a
showpiece despite Burma’s political difficulties.
In Pakistan, the Lower Indus Project, planned
jointly with Mott MacDonald, showed the way to
improve the irrigation and drainage of Sindh. David
Potten is sad that implementation has been slow,
through shortage of funds and capacity. But the
waterlogging which has forced some farmers off the
land has been eased in some areas.
HTS has been committed to Pakistan since 1959,
and has also had a commitment for over 30 years to
the Sudan, Indonesia and other countries. It has
also shown commitment to its own employees, to
training, to a sustainable environment and to
quality. The British Consultants Bureau gave it the
Consultant of the Year Award in 1992 for the
quality of work in Bangladesh.
Typical current examples of HTS assignments
include projects in Bangladesh, Sudan and
Zambia.
The Agricultural Support Services Project in
Bangladesh, funded from British aid, is aimed at
tens of thousands of farmers, agricultural
extension workers and officials. It seeks to change
the approach of agricultural advice from top down
to bottom up, from telling farmers what to do to
finding out what they need. It also seeks to
involve non-government organisations.
The Atbara project in the north of the Sudan,
implemented on behalf of the UN Development
Programme, is promoting small-scale rural
development: goat rearing, oil pressing,
handicrafts.
LOGOSP, the local government support project in
Zambia, involves developing and implementing a
programme that will strengthen efficiency,
democracy and accountability in local authorities
throughout the country.
Zambia decided ten years ago to decentralise
government powers. On behalf of Britain’s Overseas
Development Administration, HTS staff have spent
several years in the Central Province, training
staff, working with them on financial procedures,
encouraging them to get involved in identifying and
implementing development projects and at the same
time promoting private sector activity where it is
more appropriate.
David Potten says: “We have been contracted this
year by the ODA to implement a nationwide
programme, LOGOSP. Price Waterhouse are also
involved with the accounting and finance. We have
teams of both expatriate and Zambian staff in
Lusaka and in every provincial capital.”
HTS has an office in Khartoum staffed by
Sudanese and is a shareholder in locally-staffed
companies in Dar-es-Salaam, Jakarta and
Johannesburg. Projects are planned and supervised,
however, by staff from Hemel Hempstead.
HTS also works with and encourages local
consulting firms. “RDC in Sri Lanka,” says David
Potten, “was once an HTS sub-contractor but is now
a major company with more employees than we have
and it competes with us for work in South-East
Asia.”
Moving into Eastern Europe, HTS is training the
staff of a consulting company in Romania. “A
company in Poland was our sub-contractor. Now it is
the lead company and we are the sub-contractor. We
put that down as a measure of our success.”
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