Our aim is to work with the people of Tanzania to create sustainable employment by providing vocational and English training.
Our aim is to work with the people of Tanzania to create sustainable employment by providing vocational and English training.
Trade Aid also encourage local enterprise and support the community in the conservation of historic buildings.
In 1996 after Trade Aid Chairman Brian Currie visited Mikindani, Trade Aid began the process of renovating the historic German Boma built in Mikindani 1895.
The purpose was to create jobs, and to promote sustainable employment by providing training opportunities in Mikindani.
Trade Aid, directed by a local committee in Mikindani, transformed The Old Boma into a fully functioning vocational training hotel. Trade Aid hopes that through tourism, sustainable jobs can be created.
The Old Boma hotel trains forty young people a year in hospitality and job skills as well as English, IT and Maths. This training is free of charge and is fully funded by Trade Aid. Students, many of whom have only attended primary school are given their first experience of employment and a chance at a career.
English and IT classes are also provided to the local community each week and all resources are made available to the local community.
LEARN MOREIn 2018 Trade Aid fully converted the spot where Dr David Livingstone stayed before his final journey into the interior into a community-led cultural museum providing tourists with a place to visit as well as empowering the local community with a sense of history and pride.
This site will be used to encourage the local community to maintain and utilise their heritage by collecting Mikindani’s history through oral testimonies of those who live there and educating the next generation in the importance of heritage and conservation.
LEARN MORETrade Aid Tanzania Charitable Trust was founded in 2000 and operates from Base House in Mikindani, Southern Tanzania. Trade Aid Tanzania is the operating arm of Trade Aid UK in Tanzania and is vital to delivering effective and targeted programmes in Tanzania.
Trade Aid Tanzania has its own board of Trustees and is managed and led by a local team on the ground and is entirely staffed by local people from the community of Mikindani-Mtwara.
Like many towns throughout Tanzania, Mikindani suffers from poor access to education, chronic unemployment, poverty and a reliance on subsistence farming.
Until the rise of Mtwara in the 1950’s, Mikindani was one of the central hubs in Southern Tanzania with a rich history of Makonde, Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese and later, German influences. As businesses moved to the newly created town, Mikindani suffered as jobs and business crumbled.
Though it may lack business opportunities, what Mikindani does have is a rich vibrant history and a beautiful coastal landscape full of heritage and culture which fills its population with pride and hope.
Tourism offers the opportunity to create jobs and infrastructure, but it must be done sustainably. Working closely with the local community and directed by their needs, Trade Aid focus on vocational education, conservation and gender equality.
Trade Aid also manages several smaller projects including a sponsorship scheme that provides girls with the opportunity to attend school for the first time.
Despite school being universal, poverty is a barrier to girls attending school. By supplying uniform and basic needs, Trade Aid enables young girls to attend school when otherwise they would not.
Trade Aid also provides tree saplings to all schools in Mikindani to encourage protection of the local environment.
Trade Aid have helped renovate Haikata well and built the first water pump in Mitengo village.
The Mikindani local committee was established at the very beginning of Trade Aid’s activities in Tanzania and is arguably the most important arm of Trade Aid.
The Mikindani local committee is comprised of local leaders, religious leaders from all creeds and important members of local government in Mikindani. Their role is to advise on the needs of Mikindani, where Trade Aid should target their work and how Trade Aid should approach its role in Mikindani.
The local committee have been vital in gaining Mikindani conservation status as well as marketing and encouraging vocational education throughout Tanzania and teaching the importance of learning. Their cultural and historical expertise is also vital – in fact Trade Aid could not carry out its work without the role of The Mikindani local committee.
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