Welcome to CORE Tanzania
Searching for new ways to help a troubled world? We invite you to join hands with CORE Tanzania as we work to open up a new future for children in rural Tanzania whose potential is being wasted because they lack access to a meaningful education.
CORE Tanzania’s founder, Michael Banobi, experienced the problem of educational access first-hand as a child growing up in the village of Bushasha in rural northwestern Tanzania. On a 2015 visit back to his village, he was disappointed to discover that over so many years the situation had not improved. The government primary school (and until now the only school) in Bushasha had an average of 88 students per class, all taught by a single teacher. The second and third grade classes each had more than 100 students. Children were packed shoulder-to shoulder at their desks, sharing usually two or three students to a textbook, and there were no visual aids other than a few tattered newsprint charts. When asked how they manage to teach under such conditions, one teacher’s reply was “We can’t do these kids justice.” Not surprisingly, students are poorly prepared for secondary school, and many drop out.
Talks with villagers led to the conclusion that a new primary school was needed in the village. Villagers suggested a school that would use English as the language of instruction to prepare children properly for secondary school, where instruction switches to English after being conducted entirely in Swahili in public primary schools. In 2018 the village demonstrated their commitment by donating 15 acres of land for the site of the new school.
Michael returned to the US and gathered a group of friends who shared his passion about the importance of education. Together, they formed a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, CORE Tanzania, with a mission to increase access to quality education in rural Tanzania. CORE Tanzania began working toward this mission with a project to build and operate a new school, Twegashe Primary School, in Bushasha Village. Twegashe translates as “Let’s make our lives meaningful” in the local Kihaya language. The new school is now providing a high-quality, participatory education with classes taught in English to give children more chance of success in secondary school. All village children are eligible for admission, and there are no required fees. For more-detailed information about CORE Tanzania and Twegashe School, and to meet some of the children who are the inspiration behind our work, we invite you to explore the rest of our website.
Through the generosity of more than 250 individual donors, CORE Tanzania raised funds to construct the first phase (K-3) of Twegashe School. Phase 1 included four classrooms, teacher offices, a water well, a kitchen to prepare nutritious meals for students from the school garden, a cafeteria which doubles as an auditorium for arts performances and community activities, and teacher housing to attract talented teachers to this rural area.
An enthusiastic and highly-skilled group of volunteers contributed to this effort. A team from Gensler produced the architectural drawings, volunteers from the engineering firm Swenson Say Faget provided the structural analysis, a Seattle builder closed his business for five months to travel to Tanzania and supervise construction, and a former Montessori school owner donated all her materials and spent six weeks in Tanzania training Twegashe’s locally-hired kindergarten teachers in how to use those materials. Founder and board president Michael Banobi has spent the bulk of his time since May 2019 in Bushasha overseeing the project.
Twegashe School opened for the first kindergarten class in February 2020. Every year a new class of 30 kindergartners is added. We are currently at grade two, with a total of 90 students. In April 2022 we began construction on Phase 2 of the school, with five more classrooms, a library, administration block, and additional teacher housing. This new phase will allow Twegashe School to expand through grade 7 (the last year of primary school in Tanzania) and to add a pre-K class so our students will be ready to learn when they start kindergarten.
We are now just over halfway to our Phase 2 fundraising goal for construction plus three additional years of operation. We’re confident we will reach this goal with the help of our many committed donors. The village is showing their commitment as well – in April they voted to donate an additional 30 acres to Twegashe School so there will be room to expand and to grow more food for student meals.
We don’t have any statistics yet to show that Twegashe students are learning, but we get lots of reports from grateful parents. Elida’s father is a fisherman, and he said that when he gets up at 4am to go to the lake, Elida is often awake, too, asking if she can go to school early because she likes it so much. He was full of appreciation that his child can attend a school where she actually enjoys going to school! Everyday at Twegashe the smiling faces we see and the chatter in English that we hear tell us that kids are learning, and learning to love school at the same time.
No doubt you believe, as we do, that all children, no matter how poor, deserve this kind of quality education. We would love for you to join us as we work to put this belief into action!
