Give 420 Girls in Tanzania Their Own School

We have almost completed the first dormitory at the Milembe Secondary School, thanks to your help! After breaking ground in late January, the Africa Schoolhouse team has moved swiftly through construction from foundation to roofing! 

Over the past three months, everyone has been hard at work making the dorm a reality. Architects Pamela and Scott of Scattergood Design reviewed the final details of the architectural designs with Engineer Benjamin, and Foremen Elisha, Amos and Mapambano to get their input and discuss construction plans. Each member of the team brings special skills to the project and has helped things go seamlessly. 

Meet the team: As Project Manager, Kishosha oversees the big picture, project finances, relationships with Misungwi District, material purchases, and takes great care of the team. Benjamin oversees building engineering and works as general construction manager. Working with the District Engineer and with individual specialists, Benjamin has helped guide the creation of new details, such as the newly innovated window security grills hand crafted by a local welder. Elisha also helps oversee general construction and is a skilled mason and carpenter. He helps guide the whole team and has taught many men and women construction techniques. Amos is a master mason and has patiently trained so many members of our construction team. His attention to detail is simply breathtaking—watching Amos parge a wall is like seeing an artist at work! Mapambano is a skilled carpenter who has taught many others how to bring precision to the wood details of the buildings. Together, they work with the architects, innovating new techniques and constructing with great precision and attention to detail. Our architectural advisor, a professor from Ardhi University, the architecture and engineering school in Dar es Salaam, said he had never seen such beautiful foundation work before. As Elisha has said: “We feel proud of the work we are doing for the girls of Milembe School.” 

The girls at Milembe have been closely watching the dorm construction and express how excited they are to move in. Each girl we talk with describes how much the dormitory will change her life: helping her have time to focus on studies and saving her many hours spent walking on unsafe roads to school and doing the household chores while her brothers do their homework. As Elizabeth said: “I hope I can live in the dorm! I want to work hard at school and become a doctor.” The dorm will hold 50 girls and one day we hope to build another dorm as part of this compound so that more girls will have the benefit of living at school and focusing on their studies. We want to help shift the secondary school completion rate rate of girls in Tanzania from 4% to 100%! 

We are so thankful for all that you have done to make this dormitory a reality! We hope to start the hygiene building soon. It will be connected to the dormitory by a covered walkway and have composting latrines, bathing rooms, and sinks. Stay tuned—we can’t wait to update you as the next buildings go in! 

Links:

• Please visit our website for more information.

We are excited to report that our team just broke ground on the first girls’ dormitory at Milembe Secondary School! Thank you for helping us make this happen! 

A lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to help us get ready to start: we have spent a lot of time considering how to make the best living space for girls. This included touring Tanzanian schools with girls’ dormitories and learning from the wisdom and experience of girls, women, teachers, architects, and education officials. 

Through our research, we learned of the great need for girls’ dormitories in rural areas. Because of all the challenges they face, such as long and often dangerous walks to school and the expectations that girls do the bulk of the household chores leaving little time for studying, only 4% of Tanzanian girls complete secondary school. We hope to change this with the dormitory at Milembe School. 

Working with the architects at Scattergood Design, we are also dreaming a bit bigger—they have helped us design a model “dormitory kit” that could be built at any rural school in the country. This “dorm kit” contains all the structures needed to bring 50 to 100 girls to live at any school campus including one or two dormitories, each housing 50 girls, latrines and bathing house, a house for the dorm mother, a dining hall, kitchen, guard post and safety fencing. 

We are building the prototype of this “dormitory kit” at Milembe Secondary, where 50 girls will come to live at the end of this year or early 2020. The dormitory has twelve separate rooms, each housing four girls with built in bunk beds and storage space, and two smaller rooms, for “head girls”. The entire dormitory compound is being built with local, sustainable materials, and we are including composting toilets and rainwater catchment for environmentally efficient solutions to help with water supply in this rural area. We hope other rural schools in Tanzania will use the “dormitory kit” model to assure that more girls can complete their education. 

The Africa Schoolhouse construction team was very enthusiastic to be back at work beginning the dorm foundations. One of our team foremen, Elisha, said: “We are so proud of the work we have done building schools with Africa Schoolhouse. It is exciting to be building the first dorm at Milembe!”  The girls and teachers at the school also expressed their exhileration at seeing the team begin work on the dorm. Student Elizabeth said she hoped to live in the dorm soon: “I would love to focus on my studies full-time!”

We cannot thank you enough for all you have done to make this happen. Together we can help girls complete school and make sure that future generations receive an education! This is the best way to end the cycle of poverty. Stay tuned! We will write again soon to update you as the buildings go up! 

Links:

• Visit our Africa Schoolhouse website.