MEET NEEMA FOMIKO, A MAASAI WOMAN IN NDAMA, MOROGORO REGION,TANZANIA PASSIONATE ABOUT ACCESS TO EDUCATION FOR HER COMMUNITY

Through the Adapting assessment into policy and learning :Adolescent 21st Century Skills Project, GESCI in collaboration with all the Regional Education Learning Initiative -RELI Tanzania thematic groups organized a learning visit to one of the organisations’ -Sawa Wanawake Tanzania who work on enabling learning for children from vulnerable communities.

A journey was set to Ndama,Msongozi, Morogoro Tanzania to one of their project schools.At this school, we met Ms. Neema Fomiko wife and a mum of four and a volunteer teacher at the school.

?Neema was trained through the SAFINA WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION -SAWA Wanawake Tanzania initiative as she was the only one in the village who could understand Swahili.She volunteered to train other women on nutrition for babies, taking care of themselves while expectant and eventually started teaching kids 4-7 years in the ECD section of the school which is now offering classes upto Standard 4.

?Speaking to the team that visited the school on why she decided to volunteer teaching, Neema said “I became successful after going through the Sawa programme and I was moved to empower fellow women in the village so that they would benefit from the knowledge I had. Most of them did not know children’s rights or anything to do with education.”

?Through the Home-based teaching programme,Neema visited 10 households every week to deliver lessons to expectant women and mums with infants on ways to take care of themselves, ways to communicate with babies including making toys with materials available at home.

?At school, she developed teaching materials on flip chats, writing the required reading instructions in Swahili and Maasai.The School Head teacher Ms . Mwasiti Salim Jumbe confirmed that all the children in standard 3 and 4 can comfortably read and count both in Maasai and Swahili.This was made possible through the centre based teaching programme.

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The local government, SAWA and the community worked collaboratively to build classes and housing for teachers.Currently the school has 4 teachers, 6 classes and houses for the teachers.

Parents contributed Tshs.400,000 towards construction and they volunteer preparation of meals for the children at the school.

?The Chairperson of the school committee said that the community members have decided to fully settle in the area and will not move as they now have access to education for their kids and another volunteer parent who teaches the adults. They opted to employ people to take care of their cattle so they are ones who move and only the men get to accompany them once in a while but the children stay and go to school.

?They mentioned, through the community elder that the key challenges they face are lack of health facilities in the area and several elephants who get into the region late in the evenings and early mornings since the region is close to Mikumi National Park.

?Members of the network lauded SAWA for their efforts on ensuring access to education for the children in this region and encouraged them to support Neema to further her education so that she is employed as full-time teacher at the school which was officially registered as a public primary school in Tanzania in 2022.

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