Growing up with a profound disability in an economically impoverished environment is hard, very hard. Only 5% of deaf children attend school in Tanzania. There are no pre-school or kindergarten programs that accept deaf children. Most deaf child who do go to school start at 7-10 years old and finish their primary grades when they are 16-22. Often children are thrown off the bus or out of shops because of the stigma against the deaf. Tanzania Deaf Child (TADEC) was founded in 2008 by a group of deaf mothers led by Sarah Nsenga, now the executive director. The deaf mothers...[ Read More ]

Ibrahim was born in December 2008, the fifth child of his parents. When his father died, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband leaving Ibrahim and his siblings in their home in the care of his then 15-year old brother. After Ibrahim’s mother died from complications related to childbirth, their maternal grandmother began to take care of the orphaned children. Life was very hard for them. To make matters even more challenging, Ibrahim is deaf. TADEC identified Ibrahim in 2014. Ibrahim was enrolled in TADEC’s hands-on Family Empowerment Program. Volunteers visited him at home as part...[ Read More ]

Knowing from our own experience that non-profit leaders often benefit from having a safe space to share experiences and coach each other in addressing challenges, members of Pangea’s Africa Pod asked some of our partners if they would find it useful to meet with one other. The answer was yes. So in 2016 we set aside a small amount from our grant pool to help our partners come together at the Dandelion Africa location near Nakuru, Kenya, in what we called the East Africa Leadership Forum (EALF). The intention from the start was that the forum belonged entirely to the...[ Read More ]