For Christmas this year, Mary is visiting her brother and his wife in the town of Mbeya, three hours drive away from the home Mary shares with her mother in Iringa, in western Tanzania. Here, she talks about the way she prepares for the holidays. (more…)

As the leader of a Mother Support Group in Wedza district of Zimbabwe, southeast of Harare, Alice Jaure oversees a group of other mothers in her community in their efforts to alleviate poverty and suffering. Here, her husband Elijah talks about the ways in which her work has challenged his thinking and inspired him to make his own contribution to the community. (more…)

In this short film, we tell the story of Tukaeje from Tanzania. Tukaeje was so poor as a child that she attended class barefoot. Today she is a businesswoman and a leader in her community who distributes the money she earns selling clothes to ensure that dozens of struggling children will one day have the opportunities that she now has. (more…)

At the rural school in Zambia where Grace Chabala works as a mentor, one quarter of the students are orphans. Some come to school in ragged clothes; others come with empty stomachs. With Grace’s help, they will get what they need to succeed. (more…)

When Mary was in primary school, her father passed away, leaving her mother to raise seven children by herself on her wages of $8 a week. In 2003, her house burned to the ground, and the family lost everything. Consequently, when Mary passed the exams to move up to secondary school, her widowed mother did not have the funds to send her. Mary was overjoyed when Camfed stepped in last year to provide her with all the support she needed to continue her education, including a uniform, stationery and exercise books.

Without Camfed’s support, Mary says she would probably have ended up in Tanzania’s capital looking for work as a housegirl, a fate that befalls many young women in rural Tanzania, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Instead, she is now fourth in her class of 53 students, as well as being a school prefect. Camfed will continue to support Mary for the next four years, until she has finished secondary school.

Here, in the first of several installments, Mary gives us a glimpse into her daily life in her Tanzania.
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I am the fifth of seven children and my mother raised us on her own, so we were always struggling. I was never certain from one year to the next whether I would be able to go to school. But I was fortunate: In Kilombero District where I grew up in central Tanzania, there were three mothers who were passionate about education, and if they saw that a girl was unable to go to school they found it so painful that that they had to help. They supported me up to standard seven (seventh grade). (more…)