Education

Engarre supports accessible education, safe and healthy environment in schools, plans to build a free-time center for children with a library, to educate women and offer illiterate adults the possibility to learn how to read and write.

Education in Tanzania faces many challenges. One can find primary schools for children between 5 - 14 years of age even in small villages deep in the bush areas of the mainland. But these schools are often in very poor state, not having enough school benches - desks for sitting and writing, children learn sitting in dust on the ground or squeezed on the benches, 3-4 kids on a bench designed for two. Roofs of school buildings are falling apart, rain is comming down to the classrooms, rotten wooden construction of the roofs threatening lives of students and teachers inside, school supplies and blackboards are missing or are already worn out heavily.

Even though education is compulsory in Tanzania, many children don't go to school because their families cannot afford it. Even though the primary education is for free, parents have to supply school uniforms, school supplies, transport, meals... which is too much for people living in the secluded areas and having minimum income. We also noted great differences in educating boys and girls. Families in Tanzania have usually 5 and more children, some sources state 7 on average, but the number is much smaller in cities. Parents are usually able to send to school 1 or 2 children and those are usually the oldest boys. The yearly costs for one child going to elementary school is somewhere around € 300. Providing further education for children is often a significant burden for a family considering the yearly costs of high school education are about € 850 - € 1 000 per child which represents about twice the amount of average yearly income in Tanzania.

Regardless of obstacles many African children desire education and also their illiterate parents are happy if they children learn to read and write. In Tanzania more than 120 ethnical tribes live one next to the other, each of them with their own language while none of them is official. The official language in Tanzania is Swahili, it is the language used in schools and almost all adults speak it. Almost because older people living in the bush just with their families never needed to speak the common language.

Many young people in Tanzania and in Africa in general desire better life and they believe that education will help them reach this goal, break out of poverty. Engarre wants to help them to make their dreams come true without losing their joy and persistant good mood.

We began to support education from own private funds and were able to connect two of our projects at a time: we let make 30 school benches in a local carpentry and in this way at the same time supported employment in the community. We plan to help repair school buildings, provide enough benches and school supplies, provide clean drinkable water for pupils. Later we want to help needy families obtain school uniforms and all necessary to give also the children from poor families a chance to learn in the school. And we want to go beyond... make nutritionally balanced diet available in schools, build sportsgrounds, a library and a free time centre for children.

Engarre prepares a project to support children in further, secondary education. Secondary school is available for children who graduated from primary school. These schools are few tens of kilometres distant from homes of many children and so they also need to use transport, accommodation in dormitory, they have expenses for catering, uniforms, school books and supplies.

Another ambitious project of Engarre is to help reduce illiteracy among adults.