School Lunches, Solar Power and Water Projects

The importance of the classroom environment to learning is not limited to the inside of the classroom. Even when given the opportunity to learn in a classroom with paved floors, real desks and windows that keep out the ever-present dust, many Tanzanian students still face significant obstacles that often limit or even deter their attendance. AfricAid has undertaken important projects at two schools to help keep their students in the classroom.

Losinoni School Lunch Program

The Losinoni School Lunch Program - Losinoni Primary School is located in a rural Maasai village in Tanzania. Many of its 750 students walk several miles to and from school each day, while subsisting on only one meal of “ugali”, or corn porridge, in the evening. With no breakfast or school lunch, it’s difficult to concentrate on their studies, and some decide to skip school entirely. As a result, AfricAid has created an innovative micro-credit arrangement with the mothers of the school’s children; these “Maasai Mamas” craft their beautifully beaded key chains and bracelets, which AfricAid then sells here in the U.S. to generate the funds for a school lunch program. Read more here!

If you would like to help provide a student with a school lunch, by purchasing one of these key chains or bracelets or making a donation to the school lunch program, please click here. Your contribution or purchase of a Losinoni bracelet or key chain for just $25 (plus $3 S/H) feeds the entire 750 student body with a lunch for one day!

Losinoni Solar Power Project

In 2009, AfricAid collaborated with the Evergreen Rotary Club to fund a solar power project that that brought electricity to the village for the very first time. Without some form of power in the school or teachers’ homes, it is exceedingly difficult to attract teachers to this remote location. The school now has a copy machine and a computer in a school common room, with a goal to eventually supply lighting for the teachers’ houses, as well. If you would like to help give even more light Losinoni, please visit our Donate Now page.

Esilalei Water Pipe

The Esilalei Water Pipe -  Esilalei is a primary school that serves a Maasai community on the route to the Ngorongoro Crater. A group of artists from northern Colorado, Wyoming, California and Michigan visited there in 2007, and were struck by the fact that there was no dedicated water source for the school and that it had to spend hundreds of scarce dollars each month to have water trucked in. The dozens of students who walk miles to and from school each day often spend the day exhausted from thirst, and some even choose not to go to school at all, knowing that there will be no water there for them. As a result, on their return home, the artists group resolved to find a way to help bring water to the school’s students.

With AfricAid’s help, they subsequently raised sufficient funds to purchase the necessary pipe to connect to the nearest town’s water source, and the nearby Maasai villagers then helped to dig the necessary trench from the town to the school. As a result, the school will soon have its own source of water! For more on this project, click here.