Care for Africa works in water, health, education and women’s
enterprise across the rural communities of Tarime, Tanzania.
None of them work alone, and none of them arrive alone.
A water bore makes farming possible.
Farming feeds the women’s enterprises.
The enterprises supply the schools.
Children who are fed, healthy and have clean water stay in school.
Twenty years of working this way has taught us that you cannot
fix one part of a community’s cycle of poverty in isolation.
Nothing else is possible without it. A deep water bore goes into the school grounds, so the girls who would otherwise spend their days collecting water can be in a classroom instead. Clean water now reaches 32,000 people.
Clean water changes what illness looks like in a community. A
sanitation block goes in near every bore, because water without
sanitation puts the water itself back at risk. Each block includes a private room with water and soap, so girls no longer miss up to a fifth of the school year. The soap and the washable sanitary kits are made a few kilometres away, by women in the same community.
With water, sanitation and supplies in place, a school can grow. Every child gets a cup of maize porridge before class, because a hungry child cannot learn. That is 6,500 children across nine schools, every school day, and 8.8 million breakfasts since we began. Kebhosere started with a handful of students and now teaches 125, with every classroom built and every desk finished.
The maize, the soap, the uniforms and the sanitary kits are made by women in the community and supplied to the schools we work in. Eighty two women across four centres, producing 10,800 bars of soap a year and enough maize to feed the breakfast program. The money stays in Tarime and the program pays for itself.
Once water, sanitation, food, enterprise and education are in place, they hold each other up. Clean water reduces disease. Healthier children attend more. The women’s centres supply the schools and earn an income doing it. Schools that are full attract teachers and government support.
Health runs across all of it. Our visiting specialists work throughout the Tarime district rather than one village at a time, because a paediatrician or a surgeon is a district-level resource, not a village one.
This is what we mean by an integrated model of community development, and it is why we roll it out one community at a time rather than one program at a time.
Charity donations of $2 or more to Care for Africa are tax-deductible in Australia.
