Projects

The Nyarugusu Refugee Camp is located in the North East of Tanzania and receives 1000nds of Refugees from the war stricken zone in Kivu (RDC) and now again from Burundi following the recent violent political disturbances. Malaria is prevalent in the area and about 30% of the recently arrived refugees carry the disease. The IDAY team in the camp, which is a member of the IDAY-Tanzania coalition, has been trained in 2014 by a Burundian agriculturalist and Artemisia annua fields had been started with success in several schools. The recently arrived 70 000 refugees from Burundi occupied upon their arrival all available spaces including the Artemisia annua fields that have been destroyed. The local team seeks to relaunch the project with the intention to install school gardens with Artemisia annua and highly nutritious crops in all 16 schools of the camp to improve education quality. Artemisia annua has been shown to be highly effective against malaria, one of the main causes of school absenteeism. It has also been shown to be effective as a dewormer, one of the most effective measure to reduce school dropout. Since the plant is difficult to grow in the beginning, a student exchange from IDAY projects that have succeeded in establishing the crop in a sustainable manner will be called upon to provide technical assistance to the Nyarugusu youth active in the project. The project will also include the provision of school kitchen with closed ovens to reduce wood consumption and CO2 emissions. Feeding the children in school with highly nutritious food, has been shown also to help raise significantly scholastic results especially among the children coming from the poorest families. The project is not an end in itself but is part of a global program by IDAY promoting school gardens in 8 member countries to raise education quality on the basis of a successful first experience in Kenya ; In Tanzania, three such projects seek to test the approach under the local conditions (from Kigoma in the North to Zanzibar in the South) with a view to convince the Government to adopt the approach on a national scale. Hence it includes also advocacy campaigns at local, national and international levels with the hope to obtain a substantive reduction of school absenteeism and health costs and significant rises in education results in African schools.