Moshi, TZ – Tupendane and UK school team up to repair Mwangaria School’s cooking pots – Jul 2023

A few months ago the children of Mwangaria primary school were facing a challenge of how their meals were to be prepared after their two main cooking pots broke. Their cook had to bring her own personal small home pots and use them to cook for the children. This meant that one meal had to reuse the small pots several times, creating inefficient use of firewood and time. Sometimes the meals were not properly made so some children missed their meals or had insufficient amounts.

It took a few months for parents of Mwangaria Primary to try and raise money for purchasing new pots without success, due to their high level of poverty. So they approached their development partner Tupendane and requested assistance. After Tupendane assessed their efforts in the school farms by volunteering to grow their children’s banana and beans, Tupendane was energized to start to look for a solution.

Tupendane manager Deo went to the local cooking pots making guy in Moshi and tried to negotiate for new cooking pots. After a long negotiation he didn’t see a way of purchasing two new pots because of the cost of 700,000 TZS / US$300 each. So he requested the pot making guy for a help of doing a favour by repairing the old pots and improve them to an acceptable standard that can be reused again for sometime. Deo was finally able to win the pots making guy’s support and used 100,000 TZS / US$42 each to repair both pots from the budget raised by the visiting King Edward VI school students for the school’s electric water pump project and miscellaneous Grow-own-Breakfast program improvements.

This has been a huge relief to the cook for her daily work and also ensured the right savings to the children of Mwangaria Primary. Mwangaria school teachers and cooks dream of improving other cooking facilities like their kitchen, which is in need of renovation and other improvements to ensure the food the children grow is well prepared. They also hope for building of a food storage room as now all the food ingredients are stored in the classrooms.