UN project brings new hope for Maasai pastoral women

Ngorongoro. “For many years, education has not mattered to many rural Maasai people, but life has since changed. We also want to live a life that reflects we are part of the 21st century.

“We have seen how people in some regions are developing and that has helped us understand that it is only education that can make us a better people. We are a people desperate for change and development.” These are the words of Mr Moyo Koitoi, a traditional leader for Ngutukendi in the Malambo village in Ngorongoro district.

The sentiments signals how times are fast-changing in this area dominated by the Masaai tribe of Tanzania.

Clearly, times are gone when families used to hide their children each time government officials came to register them to attend school.

The people of Malambo Village have seen how an adult literacy education project being implemented by the Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC), through funding from the UN Women Fund for Gender Equality, is helping women start their own businesses and gain economic independence that is motivating their children to go to school.

Young women like Teresia Simon, 26, and Elizabeth Emmanuel, 22, together with 68 other young women and girls from Ngorongoro district have gone a step further through a Koica(Korea International Cooperation Agency)-funded PWC and UN Women project that imparted skills on how to construct and maintain a biogas plant and solar installation.

The training package also included basic computers, business and financial literacy and knowledge on sexual reproductive health and rights.

A borehole water project supported by UN Women Fund for Gender Equality is also ensuring that women like 28-year-old Nasinyari Meng’uru no longer have to walk many hours to fetch water and can have time to go to school.

Ms Meng’uru, who is the chairperson of the Malambo Water Committee said the water was supporting more than 2,000 people and had made life much easier for women and girls.

“I now have more time to go to school, run my small business and participate in the village’s micro-credit scheme,” she said. Over a decade ago, she was one of the many girls who were hidden in the mountains by their parents to prevent them from going to school.

“When the education officers came looking for me and my two sisters, they were told we had all died from a strange ailment,” she said.

Although at the age of 13 years she was married-off to the father of her four children, Ms Men’guru continued praying for an opportunity to go to school and learn how to read and write. And when the opportunity came, her father could no longer continue deciding how she should live her life.

“I was deprived of an education, something I can never do to my own children,” she said. Through her business and earnings from the family livestock, she has ensured that her daughter attends school at a boarding institute near her home while her two sons attend at a primary school five kilometres from her home.