If U.S. aid falters in Tanzania, children will suffer
MOROGORO, Tanzania — Stella Emmanuel, 16, has a vision for herself: civil rights lawyer, anticorruption advocate, and maybe, on the side, a few business ventures in hand-made clothes and homemade peanut butters. She didn’t come up with these ideas at home in Dodomo, the nation’s capital. As a youngster she had to focus on just getting to school, a 1 ½ hour walk each way.
But she landed a break when the nonprofit SEGA (Secondary Education for Girls Advancement) high school found her in 6th grade and offered a scholarship.
The school gets help from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for construction of classrooms, and a Peace Corps worker teaches English, the school’s third such volunteer.
In five of 13 regions in Tanzania, USAID is helping: via nutrition, health clinics, school textbooks, teacher training and more. Yet President Donald Trump’s first budget had no interest, slashing the contributions by 31 percent. Fortunately, Congress did its part to override short-sighted, anti-humanitarian budget cutting.
While Stella hasn’t been able to see her family for a year because the travel expense is too steep, she has had a class of just 35. Her elementary school had 100 per classroom. One public school in Dar es Salaam has 200 pupils per elementary class. Youngsters sit five abreast, jammed together on benches, backpacks still on, because there is no place to store them.
The SEGA school, started in 2007 by American Polly Dolan, seeks to help vulnerable girls pursue high school and is supported largely by donations. Unlike most schools in Tanzania, it has chemistry and physics labs, a computer lab, and a library.
Its entrepreneur program sells studentmade fabric purses and sturdy fabriccovered stools constructed of recycled plastic water bottles. Students tend an organic garden, a bee-keeping venture, and a new tourist guest house, SEGA Lodge, makes money for the school and can do double-duty when guests agree to be English-language teacher volunteers.
USAID has changed, for the better, over the years, employing many Tanzanians and partnering with other nonprofits and nations via programs including the Global Partnership for Education. The programs are helping Tanzania reach its 2025 goals of reaching middle-class status.
Yet recent changes in the Tanzanian government make the aid even more imperative. The president, John Magufuli, elected in 2015, is showing alarming dictator-like tendencies, curtailing press freedoms, negating election outcomes that didn’t go his way in Zanzibar, and recently announcing that young girls who become pregnant may not complete a public high school education, shunted off to vocational training, or no schooling.
Here’s where SEGA becomes even more important. It takes girls who have given birth (including rural rape victims, attacked while walking miles for water) and lets them complete their high school education. It also accepts girls who dropped out of school in earlier years, often conscripted by their families for work.
The school’s goal to empower young women shines in Stella. She’s assistant editor of her school newsletter and a member of the anti-ivory poaching club dedicated to protecting the diminishing elephant population.
If the U.S. reneges on its humanitarian commitments, the future could be decidedly worse. And the friendliness evident today toward the U.S. may not hold. China already dwarfs the U.S. in its monetary commitment to Tanzania. Falling farther behind looks downright cruel, and dangerous.
Uneducated, undernourished children don’t make a country a stronger ally against terrorism, they feed it.
Amid all the commotion in Washington today, some of the least expensive and most enduring examples of U.S. goodness get little airtime. America cannot afford to forgo the children of impoverished countries. No telling what the Stellas of the world will accomplish, given the chance and tools.
Former Kansas City Star editorial page editor, Miriam Pepper, spent a week in Tanzania in August as part of a delegation of five opinion writers invited by a Washington, D.C. based anti-global-poverty organization, RESULTS Educational Foundation.