Footprints Project
Since 2005, travelers like you have helped us change the world through micro-donations.
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A total of
4391
Travelers
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donated
$10010.51
(100% funded) -
to help improve
Employment
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impacting
80000
people -
in
Tanzania
Project background
In Tanzania, getting a quality education that sets you up for life is out of reach for millions of people.
Children aren’t coming out of primary school with the skills they need and classrooms are overcrowded, with up to 49 students per teacher. Most learning is done through rote and it’s widely known that this isn’t an effective way to learn. Children have to pass an exam to complete primary school and there’s no option to retake that exam, so a failed exam means no chance at secondary education.
If a young person reaches secondary school, the problems continue. The teaching language switches from Swahili to English, any young person who can’t quickly grasp English gets left behind. Teachers with the right training are hard to come by, and students can go months without subject specialists to teach them, leading to many students failing exams.
Tanzania needs to create 800,000 jobs every year, but youth don’t have the skills the job market needs. Tanzania’s progress depends on empowering and educating youth. The country needs innovative teaching methods, inspiring teachers, and affordable options for all levels of education. This will lift families and communities out of poverty, and lay the path for Tanzania’s development.
Key project activities
Anza provided sector-specific business development services to entrepreneurs in the Education sector to help their businesses grow to the next level. These entrepreneurs aim to help solve the national challenge of access to quality education and through the success of their businesses are providing new job opportunities to Tanzanian locals.
We provided entrepreneurs with training, consulting, and affordable financing to grow their businesses through a 6-month Accelerator. Every entrepreneur received:
- Capacity Building/Consulting: tailored 1:1 support and training in key business skills
- Mentoring: matching with a professional mentor who works in-country for 1-3 months
- Technical Assistance: support from lawyers, designers, and tax advisors
- Access to Affordable Capital: opportunity for direct access to flexible, affordable loans
The Education Track provided a further four additional modules designed to suit the needs of growing education businesses. These included educational innovations product development, curriculum development and marketing your education business. The businesses we worked with covered the full education spectrum from pre-primary education to vocational and tertiary training.
Key project outcomes
- 12 entrepreneurs from 4 regions were served under the educational tract.
- Businesses on average were able to generate 3 new jobs
- Businesses on average were able to reach 12,000 people within the year of attending the programme
- Businesses on average grew by 10% within the programme and by 20% within the year of attending the programme.
Community involvement
We worked with;
Local entrepreneurs: We believe that local entrepreneurs are the ones who identify the social challenges in Tanzania, and the solutions. Several education businesses were invited to join the Education Track profiles, these included; DataSky Training College, Nuru Academy, Mtabe Innovations, Smartcore Enterprises, Senda Success, Ajuaye Minja, First Miracle Adult School, Ideal Academy, High Marks Academy, Shulesoft, MITZ Group, Rise and Shine Academy, Silverleaf Academy.
Government (Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, Local Government Agencies, Business formalisation Agencies): These facilitate ease of doing business for the sector through offering direct support to businesses especially with attainment of all required certifications and clearances, create a favourable tax code for social enterprises and provide experts to train and/or mentor entrepreneurs on various issues related to regulations.
Private Sector (Telecos, Payment aggregators etc): These offer mobile payments solutions, technology transfers and access to their database of would be clients for the entrepreneurs.
Funders (angels, VCs,Pes, Donors, Grantors, Banks, MFIs etc): These appeared as mentors in the program, offered their investment policies to the entrepreneurs to allow the later to model their programs after what financiers are looking for and shared entrepreneurs profiles to their networks of investors and funders.
Media Houses: These acted as Innovation evangelists promoting the entrepreneurs through news reporting.
Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI): Anza contributes programme data to GALI for programme impact learning.
What's next?
Access to vital products and services is a key challenge in Tanzania. Anza believes that by supporting the growth of businesses, we will see development in key social sectors that need to develop in order to serve the needs of the growing population. Anza has identified five key sectors to focus our efforts in; renewable energy, education, health, agriculture, water, hygiene and sanitation (wash) and financial inclusion.
We have further developed additional tracks that has allowed us to support entrepreneurs in these sectors at a deeper level. We see the overlap for these businesses too. For the youth of Tanzania to develop, we need them to access good education, in schools powered by renewable energy. They must have reliable and affordable access to food, and have the safety of a health insurance offering that is there when they need it.
The programme will continue to be offered by Anza in partnership with the stakeholders mentioned under 4 above, and it has since been scaled to support entrepreneurs in 12 regions in Tanzania and in 2020 over 302 entrepreneurs were supported.
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