Tanzania is a monetarily poor country with a mainly rural population.

43% of the population are undernourished and only 30% have access to clean safe drinking water.

Many children die from Malaria, roughly 12 an hour, and 19% of the population, 15 to 45 year olds live with H.I.V.

With all this against them, the children in Tanzania strive to achieve and unlike a lot of youngsters here in the U.K. yearn for the opportunity to go to school.

 

To get into secondary education, children have to pass exams from primary school and to go to school for one year costs between 120 and 160 US dollars, which covers uniform, security, food and stationary. Some schools even charge for the rent of the desk and often pupils have to mix cement and carry bricks in their lunch time to build or renovate classrooms.

For a girl child to be at secondary school used to be a luxury, but the government made secondary school almost compulsory and so most really try hard to get in.

For an African girl child, education is extremely important. With it she learns self confidence, has some knowledge of her rights and hopefully can achieve a better life.

 

But for many girls, especially in the very isolated, rural areas of Tanzania, girls cannot get a valuable full time education due to their monthly cycle.  It has nothing to do with religion or culture but is just to do with personal hygiene issues and a lack of money. 

Traditionally during the woman’s time of the month they use pieces of old cotton garments which need special care, like changing, washing, drying which can’t be done in a school environment so they have to be absent for

2 to 6 days each month.

Each students tuition fees are around $180.00 per year and when a family has  scraped this together, or a sponsor has been found, that is a lot of dollars wasted.

But this problem is easily solved by giving each child in a supported school 6 to 12 sanitary pads each month, means a complete education.

 

A pit latrine is the most common form of sanitation especially in rural and low income areas.  The main advantage of a pit latrine is that it is cheap and simple to construct and due to its construction, does not pollute the top soil or surface water.  Tanzanians use water for waste cleaning and the pit latrines cannot cope with sanitary waste. 

So the girls can feel clean and have some privacy, it is our aim to build a separate toilet block for the sponsored school.

To keep the environment clean and safe each individual pit latrine needs to house a lidded bucket for the waste material. 

The school would also need an incinerator to dispose of the waste and to stop pollution of the surrounding area.

 

The main aim of this project is to provide each school with enough sanitary towels to be handed out to each girl every month so education is not disrupted. 

 

As of August 2008, I have been told of the school we aim to sponsor. It is called “Anna Mkapa Community Secondary School” and is in Moshi, Tanzania. Moshi is the town that is overlooked by Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro.

The school is a co-educational day school with a ratio of 1:1. The students come from a diverse range of tribes, who come from Tanga on the coast to the slopes of Kilimanjaro and far out into the desert region of Dodoma. Most of the students come from family’s who are mainly poor and illiterate labourers from sugar plantations and rice farms, farmers and builders, and are culturally disadvantaged.

 

     There is a Kswahilli saying, “Educate one woman and you educate a whole community.”

 

.