Educating Girls in Rural Tanzania: Our Story
“It all started back in 2012 when…
I was in my third year working with a tree-planting company in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, where I met some local labourers and heard shocking stories from girls and women in the villages I visited. There were two incidences in particular that will stay with me forever. I realised in talking to the women working for our company that in order for them to get work, they had to give sexual services to the foremen – I was shocked and reported this, naturally. The other incident was when a head teacher asked me to support a bright, young girl of 12 years who was about to start secondary school – but her parents did not have enough money to pay for her school fees. I said I would pay when I came back the following week. When I came back, the parents had decided to sell her as a child bride to an old man in the village. I realised for the first time in my life that I could do something useful and bring about real change for these girls and women. That is why I founded Lyra with the help of two very close girlfriends. As a Finnish woman, it really hit me that I had enjoyed free, high quality education all the way through university, followed by a successful career, never having faced similar difficult situations.
I set about travelling to villages meeting women and village elders asking what they suggest I help with. The answers were unanimous: build hostels for girls so they can study and be safe within the school and give women financial literacy so they can be financially independent. Both solutions resonated strongly with me, so we set up a pilot for both. Within a year we managed to successfully build a hostel and start self-sufficient savings & loans groups that rapidly grew.
We’ve come so far, and we are seeing real changes
Since 2020 over 4,000 girls have passed through our hostels with no reported pregnancies and we see evidence of better academic performance of girls studying in Lyra hostels. The savings groups increased their savings five-fold over as many years.
The Lyra model has grown as we realised we needed a broader and deeper model to achieve systemic change in these rural communities. What we have learnt is that linear, parallel projects are not as effective as a circular, integrated approach, where our four initiatives simultaneously overlap the same geographic area.
We included an offline digital learning program in our partner schools from 2017, adding coding clubs to them in 2018. It was amazing to watch as students who had never seen or touched tablets or computers before, gradually understood the power of educational tools within a tablet.
In 2019 we realised that the largest part of Tanzania’s young population is outside of the formal education system and are hungry to discover new solutions to fit their own skills and break out of subsistence farming. We started a youth entrepreneurship course called Imarika Kijana - Strong Youth. With these four parts, I believe we now have an integrated model that can be scaled across rural Tanzania that opens the mind-sets of specifically youth, but also the wider community, to new economic opportunities and truly self-sufficient, sustainable solutions.”
Asante Sana,
Maria