RUVUMA DEVELOPMENT AID

We are a small group of around eight people based in Central Scotland with active supporters in Spain and Nigeria. In all our planning and fund raising since 2000, we have benefitted from the commitment and experience of Ralph Ibbot and his wife Noreen who lived and brought up their four children in the village of Litowa in the Ruvuma area of Tanzania during the sixties. Ralph and Noreen were both active in an advisory capacity, during the foundation and development of the first Ujaama villages run on the principle of co-operation and community-led organisation. Noreen Ibbott  sadly died in 2012 but the insights and understanding she gave us into the people and culture of this region of Tanzania will continue to inform the work we do now and in the future.

As a charity we are interested in developing and supporting projects which can over a period of time improve the lives of families in this area of N.E.Tanzania. Our previous project was the development of the Magima Roof Tile Project near Songea. The potter Alice MacFarlane was asked by Ralph and Noreen Ibbot to take her expertise to Tanzania and over a series of trips taken over several years, she advised the workers and helped to develop the pottery project. Our man on the ground supervising the development, was Ntimbanjayo Millinga, an old friend of Ralph and Noreen from the days of the Ruvuma Ujaama.

Having completed her work at the Magima project, our friends in Peramiho then asked Alice for support with the building of a Nursery and Primary school in the Namanditi area and this is the current project. The school building project was initially managed by Baraka Ndakidemi, who then  became the headmaster of the new school for the first three years while Ntimba Millinga took over as project manager. When Baraka left in 2014 Mr Tumbo took over the role headmaster until he returned to Kenya in February 2017 and Kesheni Sengo took over as headmaster.

The primary school offers an excellent education to the children of the area and the teaching is done through the medium of English. The school was very much the project of Ntimbajayo Millinga who died in 2008, but his family in Peramiho and friends in Ruvuma Development Aid are determined to complete the task, and the school  is called  NMSE or The Ntimbanjayo Memorial School of Excellence in his memory. The school has continued to grow as funds allowed and at the start of 2013 there were 45 children at the school of whom 31 were sponsored.

Four years later in 2017 there are just over 190 children at the school 53 of whom are being sponsored through Ruvuma Development Aid. The sponsors are individuals and groups from the UK, USA, Spain and Japan. There are eleven teachers of different subject including the manager John Nchimbi and the headmaster Kesheni Sengo. A Library with a collection of over 1,800 books has been established and the aim is for all the teachers to have laptops and for there to be a computer suite.

Once the majority of the buildings for the Nursery and Primary school were completed 2017 we embarked on a new initiative to source funding and build four more classrooms to form a secondary school on the site. This has been our focus for the last four years so we can continue to educate the 55 sponsored children and their classmates.

As we approach Easter 2021 we are hoping to be able to register the secondary school which has four classrooms, two science labs, an admin block with five offices and an archive library as well as a toilet block and staff toilet. In addition we have purchased two houses on the boundary of the school. Our current focus is  to fundraise to equip the secondary classrooms and labs. In future we will be hoping to roof the dining hall, extend the nursery provision and build another dormitory.