Case studies
The Vocational Training Centre in Tanzania
This project grew out of a parents’ seminar which our local partner UWAVIKA mounted with UK support. As with families in this, and probably every country, the main concern of the parents arising from the seminar was what happens at the end of education. In Tanzania, it was hardly possible for a deaf child to receive formal training and skills to equip them for work. As a result, many deaf adults have never been able to enter the employment market, or if they have, may often be found doing jobs that are a long way beneath their potential.
The VTC is in the village of Ghona, in Kilimanjaro Region. Which you can see on this Google Map.
Meetings with education ministers and officials at both national and regional levels have elicited a commitment for teaching staff to be made available to this project and the VTC has already been formally recognised by the Ministry.
The first intake of ten students commenced in April 2010 with courses which are not machinery-intensive, particularly entrepreneurship and business development, carpentry, masonry, hand crafts, and tailoring and embroidery. The curriculum will be devised according to Government precepts, and to the skills of staff and the particular wishes of the students and their families, so far as this is possible. As funding becomes available a computer programme will be implemented in subsequent years.
Families are responsible for their children’s living costs – food and clothing etc, – but it is planned to create a Scholarship Fund so that no child whose parents are unable to meet these costs would lose a place they have been awarded.
Future phases of construction are planned over the next five year to extend both the numbers of trainees and the training courses on offer along with recreational and leisure facilities.
Here is a slideshow of the first students arriving at the VTC
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