Not Raising Aspirations for Tanzanian Children

July 15th, 2007 by mas | Filed under Africa & Overseas, Courses & Events, Education & Skills.

In Tanzania all of our work was based with schools. We linked up with Tanga International School to work alongside their senior students and together organised a couple of days training with local school - Sir Johns Primary. The International Students all spoke English (though none of them were native English) and most of them also spoke Swahili. After a couple of days training up the International Students we then ran a days Sports & Games Course followed by a day of Performing Arts with about 100 children from Sir Johns.

What we hadn’t realised was that there was a timetable clash and so the Sir Johns children were actually still supposed to be on holiday! We also hadn’t anticipated being followed by a TV Camera Crew for two days - but it seemed we’d created a bit of a stir and so East African TV came along accompanied by their equivalent to Ant & Dec (well just Ant)!

For our first time working in Africa, it was a brilliant experience. It gave us a lot of confidence and was very well appreciated by both Sir John and Tanga International Schools (+ a 1 hour TV show!).

Still, on reflection we thought that actually we had pitched the level of what we did with the children to be too simple. We had worked on the misguided notion that it was important to make sure that everything we did was something the children would be able to continue to do after we left. We put a great deal of effort into ensuring that everything could be resourced locally and wouldn’t be too expensive. All of this was based on the principle that its ‘wrong for Westerners to come in raise aspirations and then walk away’ - well on reflection this is a complete load of crap!! What kind of training or education doesn’t raise expectations?! The notion that African children will never be able to use modern technology for reasons of access or wealth is just wrong - firstly its very likely that current technologies will become available in the near future (go and have a look at how many people have a mobile phone in Tanzania!), and secondly not having current access is no reason for not providing an experience - do children in the UK have access to all of the resources they experience in schools?

The other reason we had pitched things ’simply’, was our fear of overcoming the language barrier. Partly this was addressed by the use of the International Students as translators - but mostly the standard of English spoken by the local children was pretty good. We did have to demonstrate things more clearly than usual and the visual demonstrations were much more important but in retrospect the language barrier wasn’t a barrier!

So some lessons learned - lessons that we tried to put to good use in Malawi!