I’ll be working in the Lindi region of Southeast Tanzania. The Lindi Region is one of Tanzania's 30 administrative regions. The regional capital is Lindi, and the region has a population of about 864,600. It’s one of the least densely populated regions, with 13 people per square kilometer.
I will be working on a project that is aimed at improving education in Tanzania by making it more relevant and focussed to future employment for young people. This project has been designed to increase learning outcomes and completion rates for secondary school students (especially girls) in 12 secondary schools in the Lindi region, and to support them to access vocational training, higher education and the job market. My role here is to work directly with representatives from 24 schools in the region to promote the development of improved teaching and learning. I will work closely with and coach 24 Tanzanian “focus teachers”, who will in turn go on to train their colleagues to deliver a wide range of new teaching techniques. As well as hopefully being helpful to Tanzanian education, I am excited by the prospect of playing a part in a different approach to teaching.
Over half of Tanzania’s unemployed are young people aged between 15 and 24 years old. As the youth population grows this is only expected to get worse, particularly for women whose unemployment rates are 33% higher than their male counterparts. One of the key areas identified for improvement is education, and this is where I come in!
Over the next two years I’ll be working directly with schools in the Lindi region to improve teaching and classroom experiences for students. The aim across these two years is that 197 teachers will have been trained, and nearly 5000 secondary school students will have been motivated to complete school, as well as been made aware of new career options open to them. This is just the start however; the best thing about this is that the project aims to scale up this work and take it to schools across Tanzania, improving the chances of young people across the country to escape unemployment and poverty.
