Give 420 Girls in Tanzania Their Own School

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.