Rahel, a US philanthropist who helps girls in rural Tanzania beat the odds

“Though I am legally an American citizen, you can’t take the Tanzanian in me. It’s in my blood,” she affirmed.

Growing up in the US with her parents, they always insisted that she maintain a good command of the Kiswahili language so that she can be able to communicate with her relatives whenever she went back home to visit, and she is so glad she did because that helped her have a stronger bond with her people and her community in Tanzania.

In their household growing up, her parents made sure she spoke English and Kiswahili as well.

For her, it was important to be able to talk to her grandparents whenever she went back home to visit.

“It breaks my heart when I see Tanzanians in diaspora lose their accent just after six months in the US,” she noted.

Rahel has been nominated in three categories in the upcoming Diaspora Awards that will take place in Austin, Texas.

Rahel stands out for her enormous give-back initiatives, serving as the lead designer at ILAVA, a socially responsible lifestyle brand.

Ilava was the first sponsor of the Msichana Initiative’s project of giving bicycles to young girls in rural Tanzania to help them get better means of transportation to schools in areas where scarcity of ways to get to school has often led to increased drop-outs and poor performance.

Ilava has also funded projects for another NGO in Arusha called ‘Empowered Girls.’

Rahel sees herself in all these young girls in Tanzania that these projects try to help.

She has been giving back to Tanzania for more than seven years, and with the recognition that comes with the awards, she hopes that it will shine a light on the projects she tries to support and that it will motivate more people to join in and help.

The Master of Science graduate from DePaul University in Chicago worked as a director of global missions for the Lutheran Church in America in their international missions.

She is a nonprofit consultant, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a women’s clothes designer with a workshop in Tegeta Dar es Salaam where they make the clothes and sell them in their Chicago store.

It is through the Ilava clothing business that she gives back to the Msichana Initiative.

Msichana Initiative, one of the most recognised local NGOs in Tanzania founded by Rebecca Gyumi, a girls’ rights activist, was the first beneficiary of Rahel’s philanthropic outreach when she was looking at organisations she could give to in Tanzania.

In their project ‘One Girl, One Bike,’ of which Rahel is one of the funders, Rebecca and her team look at areas in rural Tanzania where girls walk the longest to school and provide them with bicycles to ease their transportation woes.

Some of the girls walk 15-20 kilometres just to get to school. With the help of national data and statistics on girls’ dropout and distance to schools, they can identify these areas, and so far the initiative has been able to reach girls in Dodoma, Tabora, Shinyanga, Pwani, and Lindi.

The Empowered Girls project in Arusha involves handing out sanitary pads.

Two of the major reasons for girls’ dropping out are transportation and difficulty during their menstruation period.

Girls with no access to sanitary pads tend to stay away from school, and in some cases they don’t come back even after the cycle is over.

So providing them with sanitary pads mostly reaches out to girls in northern Arusha in the pastoral communities like the Maasai.

These two hurdles to girls’ paths to education compelled Rahel to fund the two girls’ projects.

As a full-time resident of Chicago, Rahel puts the trust in her Tanzanian partners to implement the projects that she helps fund, a concept she advises other Tanzanians in the diaspora to employ when they want to have a hand in helping Tanzanian communities.

They should be resource connectors, and the local NGOs are the implementers.

Nevertheless, when she is in Tanzania, she does pay a visit to the projects whenever she can; she was recently in Tabora and Pangani when the Msichana Initiative was handing out bicycles to the girls.

“It is impossible to do this work from afar; you need partnership,” said Rahel.

The three times Rahel has met with the girls who benefit from these initiatives, it is always bittersweet, she says.

In the world where most people are accustomed to seeing Caucasians as the aid givers, the girls are always surprised and in disbelief that the one who helps them is a fellow Tanzanian, a black girl that looks just like them.

“I greet them in Kiswahili; we sit and chat together while eating ugali,” she said.

“For them, they associate aid with white people, so it’s very important that we as black people help our own, and our stories should be told,” she added.

She feels the joy of meeting girls in the universities who have been beneficiaries of their projects.

Rahel was with the founder of Empowered Girls when she came to Chicago for a visit, and one of the girls called her to inform her that she did so well in the exams, exceeding her expectations, and Rahel was proud to have played a role in her success.

“These girls just need a chance, support, and resources,” she emphasized.

“Our organisation has helped put a girl in Muhimbili medical school, and she will be graduating in October,” Rahel proudly said.

“That’s the biggest return of our investment in the community, seeing these success stories,” she added.

Rahel insists she is not a millionaire or wealthy; she still has student loans like most Americans, but she says regardless of one’s economic class, each one of us is a Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey to somebody; she says giving has no economic class; everyone has something to give.

“The greatest honour in life is finding your purpose and finding where you can give back to society,” she said.

  She insists that it’s not that the money she gives couldn’t go to paying her bills and solving her needs, but she has found her purpose.

Rahel says that the upcoming diaspora awards are important in recognising Tanzanians and showing that even though they have moved abroad, they care about their country and are very much involved in its development.

She believes we are the solution to our problems, and it’s not just her; many Tanzanians in the diaspora are involved in impactful projects at home, and it’s very important that their stories are told and their presence felt.