Transforming Tanzanian schools with Technology

Many of the schools we work with have been using Shule Direct for a long time.  They particularly like the fact that their materials are designed specifically for the Tanzanian curriculum. Students greatly enjoy the quizzes, and teachers like that they can download past papers easily and access summary notes for revision.  This is particularly useful for the many teachers who have to teach outside their specialist area.

In many schools there are no maths or science teachers. Instead, where they can afford it the community bands together and pays local school leavers to take on this role. As they are only one year older than their pupils, and have no training and often few resources this is a very challenging job.  Access to resources like Shule Direct and Khan Academy is then very useful, even if teachers are only able to access it on their phones. 

But many schools do not have good enough connectivity to access resources online. Therefore, from your generous donations we have been able to purchase licences for Shule Direct offline use, as well as three projectors to enable whole classes to be able to access these resources at once, in the schools where they have a good enough electricity supply to run them, and a teacher's laptop to connect them to.

We hope to expand this provision more widely in the future.

Thank you again for your support. 

In countries like Tanzania that have a very high rate of youth unemployment, teaching entrepreneurship is particularly important.  Unfortunately it doesn't feature highly on the school curriculum, so we have been helping the schools we work with to introduce it.

Many schools have now started enterprise clubs where students learn useful skills such as group work, and project planning, as well as marketing, and creating a business plan. Students have also been using Excel to calculate their profits and Publisher to create advertising posters.

Many successful projects have been started, ranging from selling snacks and stationery, growing vegetables and cooking mandazi (Tanzanian doughnuts)  These projects bring in helpful income to the students and schools.  Often this funding has been used to employ temporary science teachers in schools that previously had none. 

But special congratulations are due to Ikondo Secondary School in Kagera that won the Global School Enterprise Competition for best business plan for their poultry project, winning $400 in the process, This project supports many vulnerable students with eggs, and their winnings mean they can expand.  You can see a 2 min video about it here.. 

Thank you for your support!

Links:

• Ikondo Chicken Video