Working with our partners we reach millions of people worldwide. Here are some of our success stories in Tanzania.
Development Partners in Higher Education (DelPHE)
The British Council administered the DfID Development Partners in Higher Education (DelPHE) project, facilitating cutting edge joint research projects between higher education institutions internationally.
Tanzania was a key player in this very successful project, with a total of 12 funded projects. The last project cycle, which yielded excellent results including those in health and education between Dar es Salaam’s Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences and the University of Wales, Swansea, finished in 2013.
We had additional funds attracted from the government or international donors during or after completion, and new and revised courses were also been developed at graduate and post graduate levels.
'The DelPHE funding has been phenomenal as it has provided the seed funding in things like case studies, visits and also extending relationships with other partners.' – Dr. Mussa Assad, Senior Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam Business School
International Inspiration
International Inspiration was London 2012’s international sports legacy programme, inspiring and enabling millions of young people in countries around the world to play sport.
In Tanzania the main delivery partners worked with the National Sports Council and other national sports stakeholders to deliver lasting change through sport to children, young people and marginalised groups. With the generous support of the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, the Sir John Beckwith Trust and the Vittol Foundation, our Tanzanian partnership delivered change on many different levels:
- 1200 Young Leaders are now actively working with their schools and communities to bring the power of sport into everyday life in Tanzania. They were supported to train as coaches and officials in particular sports and trained in the Olympic and Paralympics values.
- TOPS cards for non-specialist teachers to deliver sport and physical exercise activities were adapted for use in Tanzania and translated into Swahili for integration into the national Primary School Personal Development Skills (PDS) curriculum.
- Our Women’s Leadership programme facilitated the creation of a group of ten leading female figures in sport, education, media and government, who now make up Tanzania’s only Task Force body representing female leadership in sport, working together to create a national strategy to advance female leadership and access to sport for girls.
- A national Monitoring and Evaluation Framework was developed by more than 20 national stakeholders from key ministries, sports associations and civil society following two design workshops.
International Inspiration was unanimously endorsed and adopted by all Regional Sports Officers as a model to prioritise and support at their first ever national meeting in November 2012.
Sports for Street Children 2013
In partnership with the Rotary Club of Bahari, Dar es Salaam, the British Council Tanzania worked with street children’s shelters, primary schools and communities in Dar es Salaam to give opportunities to children through the medium of sport and play, art and education. By employing the expertise of Right to Play Tanzania, we trained and supported teachers and shelter staff to run regular activities that dealt with issues including gender, life skills and health.
The programme also worked with Street Star Challenge Tanzania to run activities and prepare Dar es Salaam’s street children to compete to represent their country at the 2014 Street Children’s World Cup in Rio, Brazil.
Skills and English training
In 2012 and 2013, the British Council joined forces with the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam to provide Skills and English training to a variety of Tanzanian Ministry staff in Dar es Salaam and Arusha. This built on a long standing partnership, which has had wide ranging impacts on diverse sections of Tanzanian and British society. These have included celebrations of the International Day of Democracy with Dar es Salaam school children, a comprehensive series of Master Class workshops building capacity in the business sector, and sharing the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations with Tanzania.
Baseline Course for schools
Baseline is a 6-week bridge course transitioning form 1 students to studying through English as a medium of instruction as they enter secondary school and in contrast with having studied in Kiswahili during primary school. It was initially implemented as a British Council initiative back in the 1990s, but as methodologies evolve, it was deemed time for an update, hence EQUIPT-ELT got to work.
A team of 12 Tanzanian consultants joined forces with an international consultant to rewrite the materials. We then printed and distributed 65,000 students’ books and 1490 teachers’ books to 497 schools in rural and urban Tanzania. Meanwhile, a core team made up of Tanzanian pre-service college tutors and British Council trainers cascaded a 5-day orientation training to the course and methodology to 91 district teacher trainers, who subsequently delivered the same training to 2485 teachers.
As schools opened and students started arriving for the new year, we sent out monitoring and evaluation teams, made up of British Council trainers, VSO volunteers and TIE officials, into schools to see how the course was being used. Armed with our quantitative questionnaires and qualitative semi-structured interviews and observation forms we soon realised that valuable data was also to be collected in other ways. A dirty cover and dog-eared corners meant the book was being used regularly within the class, whereas a pristine white cover meant the course hadn’t begun in that school yet. A colleague’s cousin called to say she was using a new Baseline book in her school, much to our dismay, as that region wasn’t part of our rollout! We still don’t know how they got the books, but happy it’s so in demand! Several education charities around Tanzania have contacted us asking if they can use Baseline and receive the orientation training for use in their own programmes! Private schools are also requesting Baseline. In the schools we visited the “complaints” about Baseline were that the teachers wanted more teachers’ books as they had never had anything like this before. They wanted longer training sessions and teachers that hadn’t been able to attend the training were disappointed and asked us to run more sessions. In most schools, teachers that had attended delivered the course to their colleagues to get them up-to-speed to deliver Baseline. We saw flashcards and realia and group work in the classroom. Teachers were using Baseline in their other classes due to its “easy approach to explain concepts”. So, while our numbers are still being counted and focus groups transcribed to provide that much needed and all important formal evidence, we are already quietly confident, that Baseline has been an immense success!