Help Tanzanian Youth Make Tech to Help Themselves

Hello Twende Community!

We continue to be blown away by your appreciation and generous contribution to what we do here at Twende. It has been such a wonderful journey seeing so many young people come into Twende and materialize their solutions to real problems they see and/or experience in their communities. It all happens with your help so thank you very much!

This quarter we did a lot of work with youth within the local community, alongside with the Creative Capacity Building,  During this time, colleges, universities and similar institutions close for a couple of months and so there are a lot of youth doing internships or at home keeping themselves busy. Twende thought this would be a superb time to introduce our Jamii Technology Program (JTP). JTP brings local youth as well as international youth together with a specific community, and together they team up to identify a specific problem within that community that they can solve together using their innovative ideas and abilities. These innovative technologies are created from scratch in hope to go through many prototype phases and finally a finished product that can be used by the community it was created to help.

We were lucky to get a group of ten youths, of which nine out of ten were Tanzanian and one was from the US. After a week of our traditional Creative Capacity Building session that introduced the youth to what Twende is about and all the machines and equipment in our maker space, they divided up into three groups and each was taken to a community in order to identify a problem and work with them to find an innovative solution. We were graced with four great ideas that were a wheelchair for kids with cerebral palsy, a banana peeler, a sunflower seed thresher and a paper-bag maker. Over the weeks we saw drawings turn into very impressive prototypes!

One of the ideas that have really caught the attention of many was the wheelchair for kids with cerebral palsy. The team of three (Colman, Eamon, and Goodluck) presented their first prototype in one of Twende’s other pilots called MakerSoko that is a physical exhibition that we hope to do annually as well as an online platform that will help showcase innovative technologies to the rest of Tanzania and the world! Their wheelchair, known as Kyaro Wheelchair (Kyaro means Safari or journey in Chagga, a tribal language in North-east Tanzania), got so much attention that they were invited to exhibit it at the International Youth Week Exhibition and further still in a Government Youth Center in Tanga later on in the year. It has been so exciting seeing how their technology not only showed to be important for the community they were making it for but that perhaps after a few more prototypes it could help the entire nation. The team is already working on their second prototype.

Twende loves to celebrate the creativity and innovative abilities of our youth and are so excited to see where all the projects will end up. We believe this generation has so much potential and are the future of a better Tanzania, one that solves is own problems with innovation. In the next few months, we will continue to follow up on how individual projects are doing as well as continue to work on our new project. We love that you continue to support us and keep track of what we are up to. Do sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our social accounts (Facebook and Instagram) or watch our GlobalGiving organization page.

This would not have been possible without you. Thank you so much!

Warmly,

Ellie & the Twende team

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