Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in various forms and definitions, have been filling the gap in the delivery of public service and aid. Targeting the basic needs of low-income households and groups of people with special needs and challenges, NGOs in Tanzania have implemented programs across a wide variety of themes including housing, education, health, skills development and more.
The majority of the NGO's in Tanzania sustain themselves by the support of foreign donations and many of them struggle to make ends meet. One of the main reason is that the founder member/managers of the NGOs lack the right tools required to spread their vision to larger groups of potential donors in Tanzania and worldwide.
Foreigners who come to Tanzania with the agenda of assisting the local population named by us as “SADAKA network ANGELS”, encounter many difficulties and challenges starting from the know-how of registration for a Tanzanian entity, promoting their agenda according to local context, culture and language barrier, know-how of engaging government for support, supporting their activities financially, maintaining the entity and project activities over a long period of time and more.
Once they understand the challenges, many of them change their mind and don’t even try, others come to Tanzania and give up during the process, others succeed in starting but once they as the foreign supporters leave the country the NGO fails to survive. In the rare cases where the NGO does survive, there are difficulties in making sure transparency is in place and when the founders are far away and without proper supervision, the donations and contributions are misused and not utilized as per the NGO agenda.
Recognizing these challenges, and the importance of sustainability of these volunteers and their impact to Tanzania as a country, we (SADAKA network) decided to set up a networking, support center and a technical system to assist the volunteers who will be named as SADAKA network ANGELS both in and out of Tanzania to overcome these challenges by providing the required tools and support. This will enable the SADAKA network ANGELS to focus more on their agenda, goals and implementation of their projects for the benefit of the local communities.
A) In Tanzania, community takes a very important role in people’s daily life.
SADAKA network has developed a donation system allowing community leaders to “adopt” projects under the SADAKA network ANGELS program, allowing the community leaders and their communities to be proactive and support the projects’ activities by being part of the project and sending donations.
B) Assist SADAKA network ANGELS to promote their agenda in the Tanzania, by providing some basic needs to start with:
C) As SADAKA network NGO we have also decided to focus our efforts on empowering and assisting the local communities by teaching them the right approach to promote, manage and sustaining projects that attend to the daily basic needs in their lives.
We believe that by doing so, we will be able to create wider impact that will sustain much longer and which will significantly impact and improve the livelihood of many communities within Tanzania.