“Empowering secondary school students to design and implement creative solutions to local problems and become innovative, informed and driven agents for change in their communities”
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The NeedSecondary schools in Dar es Salaam widely suffer from limited classroom resources, a lack of learning materials, poor infrastructure and pollution (mainly dust and litter).
Class sizes can range between 50 and 100 students, and as a result rote-learning is the standard technique for teaching. Youth advocates say schools fail to teach the skills and intellectual prowess employers are looking for – plus only a tiny minority of students receive any formal careers education. |
On top of this, each year, 900,000 young Tanzanians enter a job market that is generating only 50,000 to 60,000 new jobs.
As well as producing good employees, the education system should endeavour to produce job creators by equipping youth with entrepreneurial skills. But at school, students rarely get a chance to be creative or solve problems autonomously - in fact, they are often scared to express their own opinions for fear of being caned.
As well as producing good employees, the education system should endeavour to produce job creators by equipping youth with entrepreneurial skills. But at school, students rarely get a chance to be creative or solve problems autonomously - in fact, they are often scared to express their own opinions for fear of being caned.
Our WorkIn 2014 and 2015, CDI’s Education Project introduced initiatives to schools in the Manzese slum settlement that attempted to facilitate overstretched teachers and enhance students’ educational opportunities.
These included debate clubs, a student gardening scheme and Peer2Peer learning. The efficacy and sustainability of these projects were mixed, so it was decided that more needed to be done to actively engage students and give them ownership over their development. Therefore, in 2016 CDI Education piloted a new programme called the Think Big Challenge. |
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Its aims were two-fold:
The challenge required teams of secondary school students from across Dar es Salaam to research, design and implement sustainable solutions to pressing problems experienced in their schools and communities. Over the course of the programme, CDI facilitated students in the implementation of their initiatives and ran workshops training participants in skills such as critical evaluation, fundraising, project planning, delegation and leadership.
The students were chosen from three local secondary schools and BRAC’s education centre.
- To give young people an opportunity to develop employability-boosting/entrepreneurial soft skills not covered in the standard curriculum;
- To empower students themselves to work towards mitigating some of the problems associated with the Tanzanian educational environment.
The challenge required teams of secondary school students from across Dar es Salaam to research, design and implement sustainable solutions to pressing problems experienced in their schools and communities. Over the course of the programme, CDI facilitated students in the implementation of their initiatives and ran workshops training participants in skills such as critical evaluation, fundraising, project planning, delegation and leadership.
The students were chosen from three local secondary schools and BRAC’s education centre.
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Our ImpactLast year 300 students from 3 schools were involved in CDI’s preliminary workshops (self-discovery/career-related activities which allowed us to select the most promising students for the challenge), and 51 participated in the Think Big Challenge itself.
In self-evaluation surveys, students reported they felt they had improved in 11 out of 12 skill areas, including evaluation, teamwork and confidence. |
Meanwhile, the 13 successfully implemented initiatives were varied, creative and combated very real problems. They ranged from teaching the jobless how to bake and sell cakes, to transforming paper litter into fuel for cooking; from setting up a silent study area in a disused classroom, to informing the community about the importance of education for women.
These quotes are from interviews/focus groups with students, where we asked what CDI had taught them:
These quotes are from interviews/focus groups with students, where we asked what CDI had taught them:
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- "CDI has made me recognise that education is not just sitting in class and passing exams, it’s also being able to identify the problems in our surrounding environment and being able to solve them. I will pass this message to my fellow students…”
- “It starts with you, as you should be an example and other people will follow easily” - “We learnt how to solve problems without any fear, since we learnt the proper techniques” - “The project should continue because it helped us a lot in knowing ourselves. Please come back again and add other schools” - “I feel like I was respected and CDI cared a lot” |
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For the full version of the Education Project's Impact Report, please see our Publications Page.
Our VisionThis year is the next big step for the CDI Education Project: we are planning on expanding the model of extra-curricular learning and challenges from 3 to 18 schools, in collaboration with a local Tanzanian NGO called Bridge for Change. This means that around 1800 students will be impacted in total.
The Think Big Challenge is being subsumed into the larger ‘Careers Network Support’ (CNS) programme, which is going to be rolled out across the 18 schools in three cycles over the course of 2017. |
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CNS aims to combine entrepreneurial skills development with careers advice so that students leave school more employable, more self-sufficient, and better able to make informed decisions about their futures.
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There are four stages to CNS:
1. Preliminary self-discovery workshops 2. The Think Big Challenge 3. A Dream Sharing Event 4. Youth Empowerment Clubs. The self-discovery workshops involve 4 sessions entitled “My Identity”, “Future Plans”, “Careers Information” and “Problem Solving”, the last of which gives students an opportunity to pitch an idea for an initiative. The best initiatives/students are then selected for entry into the Think Big Challenge, which has already been described. |
The Dream Sharing Event will be an opportunity for students to exhibit and win prizes for the initiatives they have developed during the challenge, as well as a chance for them to interact with local professionals who will be invited to attend.
The Youth Empowerment Clubs are a way to ensure our work is sustainable – they consist of weekly sessions that provide students with a space to continue working on their initiatives while continuing to develop skills through collaborating with their peers. Clubs will be run by a student leadership committee and a teacher per school will be appointed to monitor (this framework is already being piloted in the 3 schools we worked in last year).
The Youth Empowerment Clubs are a way to ensure our work is sustainable – they consist of weekly sessions that provide students with a space to continue working on their initiatives while continuing to develop skills through collaborating with their peers. Clubs will be run by a student leadership committee and a teacher per school will be appointed to monitor (this framework is already being piloted in the 3 schools we worked in last year).
