Give a Girl a Chance: Help Educate Tanzanian Girls

With the generous donations from the Lyra in Africa valued supporters, Lyra was able to support the most vulnerable girls continue with their education and thrive!

When you speak to a teenage girl in rural Tanzania, you are immediately struck by two things: first their resilience and optimism for their future, and second, the overwhelming barriers that they have to overcome just to have an education. Only 1% of rural based girls who start primary school in Tanzania will complete advanced secondary school. Behind this shocking statistic are a multitude of barriers that rural girls face every day: highrates of sexual abuse resulting in high levels of teenage pregnancy and automatic expulsion from school and high rates of early marriage with 31% of girls are married by the time they are 18.

Thanks to your generous support, we are able to support more vulnerable rural girls accessing and completing their secondary education in Tanzania. Lyra has successfully constructed two new Lyra girls hostels this year. These hostels are havens for rural girls who otherwise have to walk long distances to school, or stay in Ghetto rooms, putting themselves and their futures at risk. 

We have been able to equip these two new hostels, making them comfortable and homely for the girls. We have been able to support a small amount of the poorest girls to stay and engage in their education, by helping with their education fees and costs. With your help we have also been able to install Lifestraw, clean drinking devices, and provide all new girls in these hostels sanipads so they no longer miss their education due to period poverty.

Last week we spoke to Malkia, a secondary school girl supported to stay in the Lyra hostel at Mazombe Secondary School. Malkia’s father died, leaving Malkia and her family to a hard life of subsistence farming. As a result Malkia stayed in a ghetto room so that she did not have to walk the long distance to and from school each day. This is her story: 

“Life in a ghetto was very hard, I couldn’t get time to study due to loads of chores and sometimes I don’t eat because of being tired since I have to cook and prepare myself for tomorrow. Temptations are so many and young men would approach me. On weekends I went home. We slept without eating because we were hungry, broke and tired. When I lived at home I used to do housework on Saturdays, so I didn’t get much time to do homework and was failing in school. This resulted in my dropping in academics. After moving to the hostel life is good, and I am getting better grades now. I am becoming the most active student at school! Thank you again for the [digital learning] tablets, the Shule Direct education learning platform is great. It helps me study all the time, and we get extra homework and exercises to keep learning. I would like to become a technical engineer because I love it. I am thankful that I am safe here.”

We are just under half way to meeting our target for this campaign and we need your help. If we reach our target, we can help rural girls like Malkia, who for personal and societal barriers are often left behind. The drive behind these girls to complete their secondary education and become leaders within their communities is there, we’ve seen it.  We just need your support, in any contribution available to you, to allow these girls like Malkia to live, thrive and prosper in one of our ‘Green Hostels for Rural Girls’.