NIS-VLO Tanzania Trip

Summer '23

Thanks to a generous donor, a team of 4 NEXT Innovation Scholars students, myself included, were able to travel to Tanzania and Kenya to explore potential partnership opportunities and assess the sustainability of the ongoing Uji project run by the Village Life Outreach Project. It was a fantastic, life changing experience and I learned a lot that I hope will inform much of my future work. Our primary work was ethnographic interviews and data collection to gauge the impact that VLO's Uji project has had. Over the last decade, they have funded a school breakfast system where students receive maize porridge - Uji - 3x a week before they begin their classes. The effects have been dramatic: after implementing the Uji programme, Burere primary went from being the lowest ranked school in the entire Rorya district to 9th out of 165. Students, faculty, and the community all love this programme, their only request was that the Uji be delivered 5x a week instead of 3. VLO is hoping to find a more sustainable way to fund or supplement the programme to both allow the community to take it over and increase the nutritional benefits it can provide for the children. Our team collected data from many interviews and investigated potential solutions to augment the Uji itself using beans or eggs with support from farmers in the community. 

​

(Deliverable in progress)