The Africa Foundation (USA)
> Click here
Africa Foundation (UK)
> Click here
NGORONGORO CRATER
Not far from Tanzania’s iconic peak - Mount Kilimanjaro - in the volcanic uplands around Arusha, lies one of the world’s great natural wonders - the Ngorongoro Crater National Park. Visitors come from all over the world to stand on its rim and look out across the stunning expanse of grassland, lakes, forest and saltpans that are home to all of Africa’s “big five” species. They stay in luxury lodges around the rim and enjoy day game-viewing drives down into the crater.
The poor rural communities surrounding Ngorongoro attract a lot of attention from guests of the lodges on the crater rim. But down a long stretch of very bad road off the main road on the way to the crater, there are two communities that are seldom seen.
Unlike many other people nearby, who live in the fertile valleys and foothills of the crater escarpment, these are extremely humble communities in a dry and inhospitable area. But step out of your four-wheel drive into the dust of Endashang’wet and Chaenda and you cannot fail to be impressed by the calm dignity of the welcome you receive from the people who barely cope in these off-the-beaten-track villages.
Appeals
- Endashang’wet and Chaenda
- Lake Manyara
- Moya
- Mayoka
- Serengeti
- Lukungu
- Mwaburugu - the fishing village
Endashang’wet and Chaenda
Two villages with one purpose
Meet Abdullah Athuman and Melchior Kimaru - Chairmen of the Village Councils of Chaenda and Endashang’wet. You collect Mr Athuman roadside at Chaenda - en route to Endashang’wet over a road that barely qualifies as such.
These are venerable, but quietly determined gentlemen. For their communities are interdependent and they are jointly resolved to overcome the shortage of basic facilities that are holding back their villages. Endashang’wet has a primary school and clinic both in desperate need of improvement and nearby Chaenda has a secondary school with hopelessly too few classrooms - and no clinic.
Without the secondary school classrooms, children from the primary school can’t move on to high school. And both schools need teachers’ accommodation.
Also, both communities are dependent on the completion of the Endashang’wet clinic for their basic healthcare. They need accommodation for a doctor and a nurse before the government will staff the clinic full time and replace the mobile health service that occasionally visits the village now. With their own resources, they have refurbished an old building left by departed missionaries that now stands waiting to function as a proper clinic. But they do not have the resources to finish the job.
Right now children learn in overcrowded, unfinished classrooms, go without food all day and make do with hopelessly inadequate toilets. Teachers have to share rooms or be billeted in village homes. Mothers with small children and babies walk long distances and wait patiently under the thorn trees for hours on days when the mobile health service might or might not arrive.
The clinic needs accommodation and both schools need classrooms, teacher accommodation, kitchen/canteen facilities and toilets. It’s a three-year challenge to bring the clinic on stream and get the schools up to standard to provide for the growing numbers of young people who will come up through the grades.
Help Africa Foundation enable Abdullah Athuman and Melchior Kimaru to realise their villagers’ hopes. They are ready to play their part. They have a building team standing by and have done what they can with their own resources. Help us provide the £175,000 a year for three years that will make this possible.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Endashang’wet and Chaenda case study
Lake Manyara
Not far from Ngorongoro on the shores of Lake Manyara, in the shadow of the Rift escarpment, is a belt of precious wilderness reserve some 60 miles long that provides sanctuary for millions of flamingos which feed in the shallows of the lake, as well as lions that climb trees to escape from flies, elephant, giraffe, buffalo, and herds of antelope. And the forest areas of this Lake Manyara National Park are home to species of exotic monkeys and rare birds.
Visitors are able to explore the park from the comfort of the & Beyond eco-tourism company’s Lake Manyara Treetop Lodge - deep in the forests of the reserve.
Both the Lake Manyara National Park and the lodge employ people from two poor and remote villages - Moya and Mayoka - that lie just outside the boundary at the far end of the Park.
Moya
From dust to desks - how Africa Foundation is helping one community
Meet Johnson Sembua - Principal of the Moya Primary School. Right now he’s in a spot of difficulty, recovering from a motor accident during the holidays. But don’t be misled by Mr Sembua’s weakened state. He’s in a constant battle to keep his school functioning in the face of almost overwhelming odds - and he’s staying just ahead of the game.
But to even the untutored eye, Moya’s primary school is in shocking shape. With only five classrooms for 485 children, two of which are still unfinished, the pupil/class ratio is appalling, and many children have to study outside in the dust and under trees.
There is no administration block or common room for the teachers, and no kitchen/canteen facility to provide lunch for the children. The school also needs toilets and urgent work to the existing staff accommodation, plus additional housing. And there is a desperate need for a project to pipe water by gravity to the school and the community from the nearby hills.
We find Mr Sembua resting his broken leg outside the ramshackle house in which he is forced to live. “Look about you,” he says. “How do we run a school with so many children - and more coming in all the time - with not enough classrooms, no place to house teachers, no place for us as teachers to work - and without any water for the kids to drink and wash and to keep the place clean?”
Mr Sembua, with the help of the & Beyond lodge management and the & Beyond Foundation, together with the village elders and the school’s staff and governing body, have developed a plan to fix the worst of the problems and bring the school to a point where it can offer the hope of a reasonable education to the children of the village.
“We have the builders, we have some money from the people themselves, we have promises of support from the government in the form of teachers and funds for topping off school buildings once they are at roof height, and we have a plan to fix things,” Mr Sembua will tell you, ”but we just don’t have the money!”
Help Africa Foundation to enable Mr Sembua and his community bring water from the hills, build the five new classrooms they desperately need (and the staffroom to go with them), fix the ones they already have, make the desks to furnish them, build and equip a kitchen and canteen so the kids can eat, build the homes for the teachers who make all the difference - and last, but not least, fix Mr Sembua’s home so he can get on with the job with some dignity!
Help us provide the £155,000 that will make this possible.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Moya case study
Mayoka
Unfinished facilities hamper patient care
Meet Ernest “Doc” Mgonho - representative of the & Beyond Foundation in Tanzania. Based in rural Arusha, Ernest is a qualified paramedic doctor for whom the health of people in the remote rural villages of his country is paramount.
For some years, Ernest has been championing the cause of the sole local clinic in the village of Mayoka outside the Lake Manyara National Park, which serves a community of more than 4,300 people and is 45 miles from the nearest hospital.
Much has been achieved. With the help of Africa Foundation, he and the & Beyond Foundation team have been able to renovate an old abandoned missionary building to house the clinic, built a home for the resident doctor and piped water to the facility from the nearby hills. As a result, the Tanzania government provides the doctor and equipment and medications for the working needs of the dispensary.
But with the numbers of patients growing and the needs of delivering mothers placing strain on the facility, there are just not enough nurses - and the one elderly nurse and midwife is struggling to cope. This means building accommodation for three more nurses, because the government will not supply nurses unless there is housing for them. They also need to build more toilets for the staff and for the patients.
And then there is the problem of emergency care - how to get people in a serious condition to the nearest hospital; and how to get the doctor to patients in crisis who are too ill to come to the clinic - in both cases, often at night and over appalling roads. The community leaders and the nearby & Beyond lodge team have done their homework and come up with the answer - a four-wheel-drive “ambulance” and a motor bike for the doctor and nurse - which the community will club together to run on a patient-by-patient basis, and the lodge will service and maintain along with its safari vehicles.
Help Ernest and the clinic team at Mayoka ensure that even in this remote area, their patients get the care they need when they need it. Help Africa Foundation provide the £53,000 needed to make this happen.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Mayoka case study
Serengeti
Northwest of Arusha and the Tanzanian highlands lies the spectacular Serengeti plain - arguably the most dramatically beautiful wilderness area in Africa with some of the biggest herds of migratory animals in the world. Every year, some 1.3 million wildebeest, 750,000 zebra and 78,000 eland mass in the Serengeti to trek hundreds of miles - and run the gauntlet of marauding crocodiles - across the Grumeti and Mara rivers into Kenya’s Masaai Mara - and later return - following the pattern of rainfall in the region.
For visitors, the game experience in the Serengeti National Park, provided by the professional ecotourism lodges like & Beyond, is simply unmatched anywhere in the world. But it is only possible because of the people who live in the poor rural communities around the Serengeti, who provide managers and staff for the lodges and for the Park itself.
On the shores of Lake Victoria, just outside the western gates of the Serengeti National Park, lie several communities - two of which Africa Foundation and the & Beyond team at Grumeti Lodge have chosen to support.
Lukungu
A refuge for orphaned and vulnerable children (OVCs)
Meet Sumayi James - formerly deputy principal of the Lukungu Primary School and Judy James, Africa Foundation Trustee. Two women from totally different cultures, but with a single passion - the care of orphaned and vulnerable children.
Sumayi had been deeply affected by the plight of these children and decided to do something about it. First this remarkable and resourceful woman took three orphans into her own home in addition to her own three kids - with the blessing of businessman husband, Michael. Then, with the personal help of Judy and Africa Foundation, she took a year off to study in specialist care centres around Tanzania with a view to setting up and managing such a centre for OVCs in Lukungu.
Local authorities say there are now some 320 identified orphaned and street children in Lukungu and its surrounding villages - children from extended families and often with only older siblings for “parents”. Sumayi will tell you that many of these children live in terrible condition. “I know of one “family” with five children that has had to take in four more OVCs - that’s nine kids! These poor families desperately need help. We need a sanctuary - somewhere the children can be clothed, fed, educated and given a chance in life”, she pleads. “That is my dream!”
But in remote parts of Tanzania, building the classrooms, kitchen/canteens, playgrounds and toilets that would be needed for the day care centres to accommodate them is extremely expensive due to the cost of transport. So local elders and the school authorities have given the go-ahead to build a prototype centre in Lukungu, combined with a pre-school for young children. This will enable the orphans and other children to bond and overcome any stigma before they start primary school.
If this is a success, Sumayi will head a programme to train other women to run other such centres that will be rolled out in five nearby communities. That’s the plan, but despite having raised small amounts of money from local people and lined up the building team to develop the centre - probably in the grounds of the primary school - there is not enough money even to make a start.
Help Sumayi and Judy make their dream come true. Help Africa Foundation provide the £86,000 needed to build a combined OVC centre and pre-school in Lukungu.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Lukungu case study
Mwaburugu - the fishing village
A great opportunity for self-help enterprises
Meet Suzi J - Manager of the Three J’s Visitor Centre in the village of Mwaburugu on the beach outside the Serengeti’s western gate. Suzi and her two colleagues established the visitor centre to attract the attention of guests at the Serengeti lodges who wanted to rent canoes to explore the lakeshore or just needed somewhere to relax, obtain refreshment, buy curios and learn something about the village.
The creation of itinerant fishermen who settled there some years ago, established families and then moved on to fish in other waters, Mwaburugu has grown into a sizeable village. But this community which enjoys a beautiful setting on the shores of the lake, nevertheless has a large number of single mothers and extended families who struggle to survive and face awful sanitation problems. Despite the visitor centre and the efforts of some of the younger men in the village who are reviving the fishing business, this is a very poor community unable to afford the proper health and sanitation facilities it desperately needs.
However, unlike so many other communities, Mwaburugu has unlimited access to water from Lake Victoria. It also has a large expanse of vacant land on the shoreline, which would be perfect for an extended market gardening enterprise and could profitably supply all the safari lodges as well as the other communities in the area. Already the management team at & Beyond’s nearby Grumeti Lodge are providing seeds and helping to teach the locals deep-level trench cultivation of fruit and vegetables.
Also, the village is on the main road through all the local communities along the lakeshore and would be the ideal location for a farm-stall, growing into a full-scale shop, where fruit, vegetables, fish and souvenirs could be sold. With the proceeds from fishing, fresh produce and visitor centre enterprises, Mwaburugu could then afford to start addressing its health and hygiene problems.
Help Africa Foundation assist Suzi, her colleagues and the village leadership of Mwaburugu obtain the training and working capital for seeds, gardening equipment, display stalls, and more for its potential income generating initiatives. Help us provide the £22,500 we need to get this project going.