What many take for granted can only be dreamed of by communities in extreme poverty such as Zeze. But this dream isn’t impossible.
We believe everyone has the right to life’s basics – a roof over their heads, enough food to eat, clean water to drink and the education needed to build a brighter future.
We are dedicated to developing our community, from empowering women and young people, training and educating people, and giving people loans to help lift them out of poverty.
Our Founding Story
Benedicto Hosea, TDT’s local representative for Kigoma Rural, has direct experience of many of the problems faced by villagers in Tanzania. Born in 1986 into a family of poor famers with seven children, he often had to make do with one meal a day. In spite of this most of the family survived, although only two members of his generation are still in Zeze, the village where he was born and still lives.
After primary school he went to Mbondo state secondary school near Kasulu. At first, he was able to travel there on his bicycle, but this had to be sold to pay school fees, which were only dropped for state schools in Tanzania in 2016. His walk was 26km to and from school each day, which left little time for playing football and homework.
After achieving high grades in his Form IV exams, Benedicto was assigned by the government to Njombe secondary school in the Southern Highlands. But after arriving at Njombe he was excluded from the school because his family didn’t have enough savings to pay his school fees up-front. Far from home, he found himself working for the Kibena Tea Company for two years to scrape together enough money to continue his education.
Now with enough money to choose, he opted for a private secondary school at Mtwango, also near Njombe, whose higher quality education led to him being offered a place to study environmental planning and management at the Institute of Rural Development and Planning in Dodoma. This was a good choice, even if not entirely his, and has provided a solid, practical foundation for all of his subsequent work.
Returning to Zeze immediately after university, his first attempt to set up an NGO to help his fellow villagers (the Rural Sustainable Development Organisation) failed because he had no money to pay for the national registration fee and countless bus journeys to Dar es Salaam. His second attempt was more successful, setting up the community-based organization Mboni ya Vijana (MvG) in 2014.
With the help of some school friends and a fellow university student, they began training local farmers in ways to improve their crop yields through the use of improved seeds, compost-making etc. To fund the work, Benedicto took a job with Help Age International in the Kigoma refugee camps from 2013-16, ploughing back two-thirds of his wages into MvG. The village council was able to give him some land on which to build the training centre but no money, so additional skills in brick-making were quickly acquired.
Microfinance & Business Training
The microfinance scheme also teaches women and youth about the businesses and environmental linkage. It encourages all the beneficiaries to plant trees and more sustainable environmental practices.
People in the Zeze community, especially the youth and women, lacked business knowledge and skills, starting capital and supervisions.
Since the start of this scheme in late 2015, it has reached and benefited over 1400 direct beneficiaries. These beneficiaries become ambassadors to the community about ways of generating income without causing adverse impacts on the environment.
The microfinance scheme also teaches women and youth about the businesses and environmental linkage. It encourages all the beneficiaries to plant trees and more sustainable environmental practices.
Empowering Women
We believe in fighting inequality, and we know that by empowering women we are also empowering the community.
We know that by empowering women we are also empowering the community. As it is often the duty of women and girls to collect water for the household, if there is a lack of access to water in the community, this can affect their lives greatly.
Just one of the ways we empower our women and girls is through improved access to water. Some may have to walk up to five kilometres a day to collect drinking water from the nearest dirty stream. That’s hours every day that could be spent studying in school or earning a decent income.
We also train women and provide microfinance loans to help them increase their income generation. Our microfinance loans can help women start their own businesses and grow in confidence. As a result, women have been able to take their children to the doctors and buy medicine or pay for their older children to study and train in a vocation that will lead to work.
Some of the women now work closely with their husbands, as partners in the business, whereas previously they worked much more separately.
At first there was some resistance from some men in the village, who were concerned that women getting loans would be a threat to their authority. Now the same men ask Benedicto how their wives can apply for a loan!
It has been amazing to see a number of the women working closely with their husbands as partners in the business, whereas previously they worked much more separately. This appears to have had a positive effect on their relationships, which was confirmed by the women themselves. In the training women were told, “Don’t use your loan to exploit your husband, rather money should be a tool for strengthening the love in your family.” They seem to have taken this to heart!
Putting Zeze on the Map!
Zeze is a village of about 9000 people, but as recently as 2015 it did not appear on maps. Now, on OpenStreetMap, an open source map every building and road is shown, thanks to the Crowd2Map Tanzania project which we have been an active part of since the beginning.
We have also trained many local people around Zeze to use maps for navigation, community development and planning, as well as to use data collection tools such as Open Data Kit, ODK.
Crowd2Map is a crowdsourced mapping project putting rural Tanzania on the map. Since 2015, we have been adding schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and villages to OpenStreetMap, an open source map available to all, with the help of over 11,500 volunteers worldwide and 1600 on the ground in Tanzania.
With minimal budget and no staff we have so far added over 4.1 million buildings and trained community mappers in 26 areas of Tanzania. It helps community development in places like Zeze.
We have helped set up Youthmapper chapters in 7 different universities in Tanzania and given training to many different community groups.
The mapping is in two phases – firstly online volunteers trace roads and buildings from satellite images, then volunteers on the ground add names of villages, clinics, offices, churches, shops and other points of interest using a free smartphone app Maps.Me.
We have also trained many local people around Zeze to use maps for navigation, community development and planning, and will continue to do so!
Youth Camps
We know that by training and educating the youth we are not only providing opportunities for the future, but also making sure our environment will be protected too.
Just over five years ago we held a youth camp which delivered technical and entrepreneurial skills to young people, to ensure the strategies and ideas used by Mboni ya Vijana to build income and food security are spreading quickly and successfully.
Young people who took part, learned, shared and enjoyed different skills such as beekeeping and honey processing. They also learned new skills such as resources and finances, rocks and ground water behaviour, borehole drilling, and soap making.
The camp also involved making bricks to help Zeze Secondary School build a laboratory, and participants learned about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and laws and environmental issues including adaptation to climate change.
The youth who participated in the camp were soon using their skills to make and sell products, and to help the community.