Digital Literacy Tanzania, United Republic of Project #30346

Help Tanzanian Youth Make Tech to Help Themselves

by Twende

Project Report | Jun 11, 2019
We Did It!!!

By Ellen Mndima | Executive Director

Creative Capacity Building program at our workshop

Hey Twende Community!

What a journey it has been! Even as we close up this wonderful project, we cannot fathom how great of help this whole community here has been in accomplishing our project with the youth of Arusha, Tanzania in the past months. It has truly touched our hearts at the workshop, but even more, it has had a great impact on all the people we managed to reach thanks to you!

This project has managed to reach 493 youth in the north-eastern regions of Tanzania, where 275 were girls and 218 boys. We have also been lucky enough to conduct 26 programs both in our workshop and in different schools and communities neighbouring us. We are grateful to our team, particularly Epifanis, Bernard and Chris, who make up the Elimu (Education) Team, who continuously develop better ways to engage with our youth in the Outreach programs.

We will continue providing our creative capacity building programs to the youth of Tanzania as we carry our vision to empower Tanzanians with innovative solutions to real community challenges that they can create through our programs, and we hope to reach further into the more rural areas of our region, with hopes that we can service more people with the opportunity to solve problems using innovation.

This is definitely not goodbye; please do keep a look out for more of our projects. We are always grateful for every donation given to our cause, and we always look forward to giving you updates of how great of an impact your support is making.

We could have not done this without you. Thank you so so much! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social accounts (Facebook and Instagram) or watch our GlobalGiving organization page.

With immense gratitude,

Ellie and the Twende team

Links:

Permalink

Feb 19, 2019
Built Its, LED Trainings, CCBs and plenty of fun!

By Ellen Mndima | Executive Director

West Kilimanjaro simple cart that fetches water

Hey Twende Community!

It’s a brand new year, and we are so close to finishing our project goal! We are so excited and cannot thank you all enough for making this happen! Twende may be a small community here on the ground, but it expands to a movement here. You are all so appreciated!

We have had the pleasure of interacting with plenty of youth aged between 13 and 35 these couple of months (299 to be exact, with 146 of them being female)! It has been an experience seeing all these participants experience Twende through our various programs.

In our Creative Capacity Building program, we worked with 25 girls and 10 boys. The 25 girls are form IV graduates from a Maasai community in West Kilimanjaro. After finishing their secondary education, the girls have been heavily involved with agriculture and small businesses like making and selling jewellery as a means of generating income. The group was a pleasure to work with as they are hard workers who managed the activities really well and with ease. They were very excited to make things like the cone-shaped maize sheller and simple chairs as these were things that directly relate to their daily life.

The other group consisted of 10 boys who participated in the same Creative Capacity Building activities, particularly taking a deep interest in creating electronic-based technologies and produced wonderful, useful technologies.

The groups together were able to make a series of projects, including a simple cart to carry water across long distances, an automated padlock and the fire detector. These projects are progressing and will be tested as more prototypes are made, whilst ready products like the cart are already in use in the West Kilimanjaro community!

We have also had other programs running. We usually implement short LED training (involved introduction to electric circuits and the basic functions of resistors, diodes, capacitors, etc.) at various schools, and this is followed by a Build It session at Twende if the school and the kids are further interested in building the innovative skills they obtained from the LED Training. We were happy to receive 98 girls and 122 boys from different schools are interested in taking the LED Training. They were able to see other examples of what other kids from other schools made and practised making circuits and Ohm’s Law using vivid examples. The aim of doing this is to get the kids to see just how easy it is to transform knowledge studied in class to a real-life situation.

From these LED Training, we had 10 girls and 19 boys then opt to participate in our Build It program after showing great interest in the LED training in their respective schools. Every student built a flashlight and got to take it home at the end of the day. The Build It program is a three-day training where the kids get to make different technologies they can take home, and on the last day, the kids come up with their own technology that will help them solve a problem they saw at home, school, or community.

It has been awesome fun, and we are excited to hold more of these programs as we start to prepare for the Jamii Technology Program that will be held once again this summer. We are able to do these programs because of your generosity and belief in what we stand for at Twende; a better Tanzania with our own problem solvers in the community. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social accounts (Facebook and Instagram) or watch our GlobalGiving organization page.

Warmly,

Ellie & the Twende team

Fire detector prototype #1

LED Training session - full circuit!

Chris showing the kids how to make a basic circuit

The kids get to take home their torches

Links:

Permalink

Nov 21, 2018
Ending The Year With Youth Camps!

By Ellen Mndima | Executive Director

Wheelchair taken for testing at the community

Hey Twende Folks!

Wow, the year is almost over! And as we close we remember all the help we have received from this community. It has been such a great journey watching all sorts of folks from all backgrounds coming together to make this work, to bring ideas to life and walk with us towards our goals. Thank you so much, everyone.

This quarter started off with the last weeks of the Jamii (Community) Technology Program, where the students presented their project stages for the last time at Twende before they are taken for testing, with hopes that the groups will continue to work on the next prototypes of their project. The wheelchair also managed to find itself in a few youth events and exhibitions where it caught the attention of both the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Science and Education, which is pretty awesome! We hope that their new connections through the people they have impressed will also potentially fund their wheelchair’s next prototypes and final product.

We have also had the pleasure of working with a young, wise 13-year-old student who has brought a lot of ideas on board at the workshop and is working on a survey of whether he should make a local bicycle he calls “The Rounder”. This bicycle will be made entirely of scraps and recycled material, ranging from plastic bags to metal frames from thrown away bikes. The Rounder will also exhibit cool facilities such as a cup holder and a roof for rainy days! More on this in a couple of months!

As we get closer to the end of the year, we become excited about our youth camps that happen in December. We are currently selecting our students for this year’s series of Creative Capacity Building program and reaching out to more schools about the benefits of building the innovative side of children while they are still learning.

Twende loves new students coming in all the time and we like to encourage them to create technologies. We believe this generation has so much potential and are the future of a better Tanzania, one that solves is own problems with innovation. In the next few months, we will have more creative capacity building programs and continue to follow up on how individual projects are doing as well as continue to work on our new project. We love that you continue to support us and keep track of what we are up to. Do sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social accounts (Facebook and Instagram) or watch our GlobalGiving organization page.

Remember, we do this because you help us. Thank you so much!

Warmly,

Ellie & the Twende team

Ellie giving JTP certificates.

Links:

Permalink

‹ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ›

About Project Reports

Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.

If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.