Women in STEM

In 2019 in Tanzania, only 31% of students enrolled in science-related degree courses were women. One of the biggest barriers to girls studying STEM subjects is the ingrained cultural perception that science and technology are not meant for women. Often, girls are openly discouraged from studying such subjects by family, peers, and sometimes even teachers. 

The rote memorization education system makes it difficult for students to think beyond their problems, let alone identify the possibility of creating solutions. This leads to an over-dependent attitude towards employment and increases unemployment in real terms as employers seek candidates with problem-solving skills. 

The community also relies heavily on the government to provide solutions to the challenges they face, whether large or small. Because the government also relies on aid, the effect has trickled down to its people who are now also dependent on expensive imported technologies to  meet their challenges.

Twende addresses this problem by shifting mindsets through programs like the Creative Capacity Building workshops, Build-It workshops and STEM outreaches where we develop the participants’ ability to make simple solutions like home based devices. We teach them the basics of engineering and empower them to be creative enough to be able to solve simple problems.

The Creative Capacity Building methodology, developed at MIT’s D-Lab and adapted by    Twende for Tanzania, is a hands-on curriculum that trains participants to identify needs and areas of opportunity in their communities and use local resources to build innovative solutions. Twende has run successful CCB workshops with hundreds of farmers, entrepreneurs, and students—including a group from the Girls Foundation of Tanzania. 

  During the first portion of CCB, participants work through exercises in building a simple but useful technology that will give participants familiarity and competence with tools. These technologies include a maize shelling tool, a low-cost bottle opener, and a torch made of plumbing pipes. In the second phase of CCB, participants work in small groups to identify needs in their lives that can be addressed with a technology-focused innovation. Each group designs a technology to address one need and manufactures a functional prototype. Technologies created by participants in past CCBs include a vegetable cutter, a low-cost beehive, and a groundnut grinder. Instructors will give technical support and training as needed, but the prototype will be designed and realized primarily by participants.

By the end of the workshop, participants leave with a basic and useful prototype, a set of technical skills, and shifted mindsets. Specifically, participants typically share that they feel more confident in their ability to solve challenges using resources that are readily available and feel inspired to share the design process with others in their community.

After the Creative Capacity Building workshop is done, the tech incubation workshop will take some of the prototypes forward into intensive prototyping which will eventually lead to a marketable product.

Through the tech incubation program, we aim to bridge this gap by hosting the project champions/ innovators for three months to undergo intensive prototyping and testing that will lead to the development of working and successful technologies and market ready. 

The incubation program provides necessary facilities and needs like accommodation, equipment, materials, transport, meals etc. so that it is easy for them to focus on their projects.

Our solution serves school girls. Since traditional education in Tanzania focuses on rote memorization to pass examinations, most students are ill-prepared for the world after graduation. Teachers, schools, parents, and students themselves are realizing this, and everyone is seeking the most cost- and time-effective ways to engage in more practical, relevant educational opportunities. In the big picture, the market for our Twende Girls Challenge Prize is huge, as we are essentially targeting every secondary school girl (or future secondary school girl) in Tanzania. In the more realistic picture, we plan to start in Arusha and the surrounding areas - using this grant to pilot the idea with 400 girls in 20 schools.

The Twende team is composed of highly competent people that bring a diverse and proven bevy of professional talents and experience.  Our professionalism is only matched by our intense desire to help youth within local Tanzania communities become innovative and create successful ventures, careers and their own paths of entrepreneurship.

Twende has been very lucky to realize a group of self-driven, focused individuals that are eager to be the change they want to see. From experienced professions, to passionate seekers of solutions, from environmentalists to mechanics, Twende has a plethora of talent that give their day to day to Twende’s vision of creating Tanzanian problem solvers. The culture is human-centric, where everyone comes from a place of empathy to help each other thrive in their journey and growth. Out of work, Twende’s leadership team is involved in many other communities that sought to make Tanzania, and the world at large, a better place.

We believe that this is the right call to support our mission in Tanzania. We are seeking for support in various aspects that include

Funding. We are grateful for the financial support we get from  our partners and donors that have powered our programs and reach until now, however, with the bigger vision that we have, we require more funding to support our innovators, reach more learners and members in the underserved communities and empower them with the right skillsets and resources for them to become more innovative.

Funding plays a huge role in makerspace enhancement, program quality and innovators support by compensating the trainers, buying materials and machinery.

We also need to diversify our pool of advisors and mentors who 

1. Will help in modifying our programs and how we approach technology development at an organization level since we believe local tech solutions could be more effective if there are more options available rather than metal and wood work.

2. Support our innovators through both the technical and business aspects of their innovations. The technical aspect will require experts who  know engineering and the challenges of turning a rough prototype into a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). After the program, most of them need to be equipped with skills like fundraising, storytelling, marketing etc which are ingredients to success apart from having a workable technology. Then we need experienced developers to monitor our incubatees.

Our solution is innovative because it is a new approach to learning and providing practical skills in hardware tech innovation especially in Tanzania. 

This serves to be useful to most learners since most students have little hands-on experience from school due to the fact that most public schools have no laboratories or the few ones could have few resources that will help the students apply the theories they learn in class.

Taking the students through the design cycle and teaching them how to use some hand tools and machines is one experience that makes them innovative and they can do more with less

In the next 5 years we aim to impact over 8,000 learners through various STEM programs.

Twende plans to expand both our workshop capacity and our geographical reach in the next five years as well as building capacity for more community members to be more innovative to be able to solve their own problems through technology.

First, we would like to increase our workshop capacity to better support our innovators and reach more people in the Arusha community. To achieve this, Twende plans to establish a new Satellite Centre and a new Faraway Centre in Arusha. These centres will enable us to host more programs and improve the support that we provide to our innovators in long term engagements. 

Second, we would like to increase our geographical reach by building a new Innovation Centre in Iringa or Tanga regions in Tanzania. Though we have currently reached over 1000 people in the Arusha community, we have not been able to extend our reach into other regions due to financial constraints. This limits the number of participants that can benefit from our programs as long distance transport is too expensive for our target audience to travel to us. Therefore, by establishing a new Innovation Centers, we would greatly increase the number of people who could benefit from our programs, inspiring and enabling the communities to solve their own local problems using their local resources. 

1. Short Term: We utilize feedback forms and record data to better track student experience and outcomes. These feedback forms use likert scales and forced choice to help us better understand and communicate our impact as well as refine our programs
2. Medium Term: Implement a pre-course survey to measure student growth. These surveys are brief and ask students about their confidence in key areas. By comparing students answers before and after, we can understand if/how it helps students gain confidence and skill
3. Long Term: use a framework for measuring the success of innovations

Prototype

Minimum Viable product

Ready for sale

First Customer

Profitable

We empower people to design and make their own technologies to solve their own problems.

We do this through the workshops we run that include STEM outreaches, Build-It workshops, Creative Capacity Building, Tech Incubation and technical mentorship and support in our makerspace.

From the workshops we expect participants to have a shifted mindset, a working technology in form of a prototype or a finished product.

We support the innovators to develop their technologies to the point where they can use them, sell or manufacture more technologies. We believe that the innovations made will provide more local youths with employment, self employment and a spirit of entrepreneurship which will eventually eradicate poverty.

With a special focus on hardware technology, we leverage the use of mechanical engineering, tools and technologies that give our participants hands-on experience in making and learning different aspects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Different machines like grinders, drillers and lathe machines will make it possible for the participants to prototype and gain confidence in making new devices and technologies.

We recruit members, students, interns, volunteers, staff and directors from all backgrounds and our constitution stipulates that.

Our community is globally spread and locally centered which makes it diverse. The board of directors is 43% International and 57% Tanzanian. Our innovators come from various countries around the globe.

Twende currently  relies on philanthropic grants, donations and funding from institutions.

Less than 15% of our revenue is generated by our workshop/ makerspace in which we charge workshop fees to the users and innovators. 

As we continue to grow our network, we continue to identify hindrances from gaining sustainable revenues from our programs. Speifically:

We mainly work with  rural areas or vulnerable communities

Because we generally work with vulnerable communities, we do not charge large fees for our programs, sometimes not charging at all so as to help and not hinder the communities we are trying to help the most. These communities usually consist of children from difficult or low-income backgrounds, women and girls in rural regions as well as college students who do not have the meant to pay for our programs. 

Our approach in urban areas are in schools

Schools play a large role in our programs, with most of our participants being from primary and secondary schools. These are usually schools that cannot afford to pay large amounts of money for the programs but are keen to partner with us to generate an excitement for creativity in schools, even as an extracurricular activity.

Consultation Opportunities

We recognize the opportunity of consulting schools and communities in the ecosystem that are looking to start their own program or workshops similar to our design. This will benefit us as we can conduct training on how to implement the design process and also help monitor the initiatives at a fee. We believe this would grow exponentially as schools and communities continue to see the value of our programs and want to replicate a simpler version that can be done in their area, perhaps forming clubs or other recreational activities. 

Increasing our charges for able communities

Re-evaluating the charges we have for international schools and communities that are able to afford higher changes, of course with incentives such as modern build to programs that include current technology interaction, creating more value in our programs.  

Corporate Workshops

Create tailored programs for the corporate community, ie. the workforce. These programs would be ideal for large companies or small teams that are considering to encourage intrapreneurship and critical problem-solving skills confidence in the place of work. They would be tailored for the  corporate space so they ignite the relevant  critical thinking confidence in the workplace.

In general, we anticipate further diversified revenue streams in the future, in which we aim to foresee 20% from institutional funding, 35% crowdfunding and 45% income from our programs in five years.

Until now, our partnership with schools has been fruitful since most schools have gained interest in what we do and they see the value of our programs and this has attracted them to pay for their students to attend the programs.

We have received funding from institutions  like the Segal Family Foundation, the Government, the Southern Africa Innovation support and crowdfunding platforms like Global Giving and GivingWay.