The Toa Nafasi Project

Über uns

The Toa Nafasi Project is a charitable organization that was conceived in 2009 and incorporated in 2012 in response to the “one size fits all” approach to education in Tanzania, East Africa. In Swahili, toa nafasi means “provide a chance,” expressing our mission to give every learner in the primary school classroom an opportunity to succeed, regardless of his or her learning style. Our activities are carried out in government public primary schools. The goal of The Toa Nafasi Project is to enrich the classroom experience, create a linkage between school and home, and offer a chance to succeed for both student and tutor.

Vision
We envision a world in which every Tanzanian child is provided a chance to receive quality education that recognizes and fosters individual talent, and every Tanzanian woman an opportunity for professional advancement and personal empowerment.

Mission
Our mission is twofold. Founded on the notion that each child is an individual with diverse aptitudes and learning styles to be encouraged, we help public primary school students in Tanzania to develop strengths, overcome challenges, and cultivate creativity.
We hire and train underemployed local women as tutors, and work with the Ministry of Education, parents and caregivers, and the community at large.

Our work:
• Assess: Each year, our staff with the permission and cooperation of school administrators, take a census of all the children enrolled in Standard One. We observe each child for social behaviors, adaptive abilities, and motor skills as well as test them for literacy, numeracy, and cognitive skills to get a full picture.
• Refer: The Toa Nafasi Project has a referral system of health professionals to treat those pupils who are struggling due to medical or psychosocial issues. In past years, we have assisted children with adenoid and tonsil surgeries, rehabilitated those suffering from sexual abuse trauma, found proper boarding school facilities for those who cannot succeed in the inclusive classroom, perhaps due to autism or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and treated a multitude of children with complaints ranging from vision and hearing impairment to mild medical conditions.
• Modify: The Project works with the remaining children who are still struggling to reach their potential to help them complete the standard Tanzanian curriculum in a modified context. Because the Tanzanian educational system requires that schoolchildren sit for periodic national examinations, the national curriculum must be adhered to but the syllabus and/or teaching methodology can be readily adjusted for students with special needs with more time spent on each lesson, one-on-one time with the tutor, and hands-on work.
• Train: The Toa Nafasi Project’s corps of tutors is trained by our international education consultants to observe and test each student. Staff from the Gabriella Centre provide further training throughout the year. Post-training, our tutors are able to employ new pedagogical methods such as Teaching with Visualizations, Jigsaw Lessons, Total Physical Response, and other new methodologies to help young children grasp subject material more easily.
• Enhance: The Toa Nafasi Project uses its public-private partnership with the Tanzanian government and local communities to provide support for these struggling students, their parents and families, and the teachers and administrators within the public school system. And, by utilizing a previously unemployed local workforce made up primarily of village women, we are also providing jobs and perpetuating a sense of empowerment and professionalism where none existed before.

Sarah Rosenbloom is the Founder of the Toa Nafasi Project.

For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.