Climbing for Education in Tanzania

Thanks to the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Wes Krause, co-founder of Moun­tain Mad­ness, and avid climber Rich Ward, the Octo­ber Moun­tain Mad­ness climb of Kil­i­man­jaro will also be a pro­mo­tion of edu­ca­tion in Tan­za­nia. On his trip, Rich will be vis­it­ing Mat­eves Sec­ondary School, to which he is gen­er­ous­ly donat­ing to expand the school for more stu­dents. With the funds from Rich’s dona­tion this expan­sion will come one step clos­er to com­ple­tion. Read below to find out more about Mat­eves Sec­ondary School:

Build­ing the school

Mat­eves Mis­sion State­ment is:

“To tack­le illit­er­a­cy in the com­mu­ni­ty by ensur­ing that all enrolled stu­dents are pro­vid­ed with fit­ting and qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion, offered in an envi­ron­ment that is con­ducive, and deliv­ered by a com­pe­tent and high­ly moti­vat­ed teach­ing staff.”

In 2006 the Tan­zan­ian gov­ern­ment made sec­ondary edu­ca­tion one of its high­est pri­or­i­ties mak­ing it manda­to­ry to have a sec­ondary school in every ward across the country.

Mat­eves Sec­ondary school was estab­lished on April 10^th, 2006. At that time there were 123 stu­dents and 8 teach­ers. The school had no class­rooms, so space had to be bor­rowed from a neighbor.

Every year the gov­ern­ment assigns a new ​“batch” of sec­ondary school stu­dents to all gov­ern­ment schools. Mat­eves is now receiv­ing about 450 new stu­dents enter­ing at the low­est sec­ondary grade, Form I. Since 2006 the school has grown to approx­i­mate­ly 1200 stu­dents and will, in the near future, reach the gov­ern­ment quo­ta of over 1600 students.

School kitchen

Since its begin­ning, with no class rooms at all, the school has grown to 10 rooms; not all are quite fin­ished yet. But with the help of small amounts of gov­ern­ment funds and lots of gen­er­ous donors the hope is to have these 10 fin­ished by Sep­tem­ber when the 2010 Nation­al Exam­i­na­tion takes place. There are now 17 teach­ers. It is note­wor­thy that in the first Form II Nation­al Exam­i­na­tion tak­en at Mat­eves 100 out of 123 stu­dents passed and were moved on to Form III.

There obvi­ous­ly is aneed many more class rooms. Even to get to a point of hav­ing only 50 stu­dents per room there is a need to more than triple the num­ber we cur­rent­ly have. Dona­tions are the main source of fund­ing for new build­ings so any­thing we can do to encour­age more fund­ing would be fantastic.

The school is locat­ed 18kms west of Arusha town with­in Ngor­bob Vil­lage, Mat­eves ward, Muku­lat Divi­sion with­in the Arusha Dis­trict Council.”

Giv­ing out Mosi nets

We are excit­ed to begin a part­ner­ship with Around-n-Over that will allow our trip par­tic­pants or oth­ers inter­est­ed to make tax-deductible dona­tions. If you would like to con­tribute to the school project, tax-deductible dona­tions can be made through Around-n-Over, whose mis­sion is to edu­cate and to inspire through human pow­ered jour­neys. Click here to donate! Dona­tions can be made to the Moun­tain Mad­ness Projects fund at Around-n-Over.