Brampton Tanzania Trust

What is Brampton Tanzania Trust ?

We are a small charity raising much needed funds, usually in hundreds of pounds rather than millions, for specific projects identified by the people of four villages in northern Tanzania. We have members throughout the UK as well as up here in Cumbria, and over two-thirds of our current members have already been out to Tanzania to see things for themselves and to meet the enthusiastic and energetic villagers of Uru North. All our members are kept up-to-date through regular newsletters and via this website.

There are four villages in Uru North - Njari, Ongoma, Mrawi and Msuni. The area is estimated to have a population of about 28,000 according to the 2002 National Census. Everything we do begins with the needs and wishes of the villagers themselves. The Uru North Community Development Trust - UNCODET - comprised of representatives from all four villages, looks carefully at projects which meet specific needs, selects those which are viable and of most benefit, and forwards details to BTT UK, whose committee meets here in Cumbria and has a further look at the viability and requirements of each project. Funds are then allocated and the progress of each project is monitored by both committees. Some projects bring benefits to just one or two villages. Others benefit the whole community. More often than not they bring benefits beyond what was originally imagined.

What this translates into is being involved with extra school classrooms and kitchens, road improvements, irrigation furrows bringing vital water, enterprising women’s groups learning and teaching new skills, bulls and chickens, fishponds and clay stoves, bread ovens and sewing machines . . . the list is extraordinary. We have also played an important part, in co-operation with Skillshare International, in a project to bring vital health facilities and health education to Uru North through dispensaries and a developing major health project.

The local people of Uru North, who identify these projects and work to bring them to completion, give what they can financially, gather stones and building materials, set to with their own tools, and use their own skills and experience and local contacts to create great things from small in a way that is inspiring.

The benefits of what appears to be just a small-scale practical project are often wider than one might imagine. A new school kitchen and covered dining-space, built with BTT help, means better fed children who reach higher educational standards and can go on to secondary school - where BTT is helping to build extra classrooms to accommodate them. Repairing irrigation furrows does more than bring a reliable water supply to irrigate the land. Smallholders can now grow extra cash crops to convert into money to send children to school. And who would have thought that it would also bring a fresh source of food as fish-ponds were created to breed delicious Tilapia ?

On this website you can see pictures and read project files and newsletters - including the latest this year - which will give you a vivid awareness of how much can be achieved and what a difference each specific, practical project can make.

Membership of BTT

We welcome anyone who shares our basic belief that is the people of Tanzania themselves who can identify their own immediate needs - and that specific practical projects can bring great benefits. If you want to become a member and support what we do, please contact us and we’ll get back to you.

Your annual subscription of £15 will go towards funding approved projects and bringing you up-to-date news and pictures of progress. You may also make a general donation if you wish to support all our current and new projects - or you can identify one or more specific projects which you would like to support with a personal donation. You may also decide to make an individual effort to support a particular project you have identified - or come up with a fund-raising idea or a suggestion that may help us. If so, please let us know.

How BTT operates and how it began

The Trust operates through its two committees, one in Tanzania and one here in UK, which meet regularly and keep close contact with each other - these days much more easily through the wonders of email and the mobile phone as well as regular personal contact. Each of the four villages of Mrawi, Ongoma, Msuni and Njari, which make up this rural community north of Moshi, has its own committee of five members who identify development needs at the village level. Suggestions for projects to meet these needs are then worked out in detail and brought to the full BTT Uru North committee, made up of two representatives from each village, where they are scrutinized closely in terms of viability and value to the community. Those chosen are then forwarded to BTT UK for funding consideration. BTT Uru North is now also registered with the Tanzanian government as an independent organisation - Uru North Community Development Trust (UNCODET). It is the Uru North committee and the villagers themselves who do the actual work on the ground in Tanzania. Both committees carefully monitor the progress of the specific projects chosen.

For our part, we in BTT UK have the satisfaction of raising funds for materials and equipment, making contacts with other agencies where this may help, sometime helping with negotiations with local authorities or relevant agencies out in Tanzania. And always we find ourselves sharing the delight of seeing just how much can be accomplished.

And now for the story of just how a small Cumbrian market town became so closely involved with four distant villages, on the edge of the rainforest, on the slopes of Africa’s highest mountain . . .

In 1987, a science teacher from William Howard School, Brampton met the Chairman of Governors of Uru Secondary School at a conference on Third World Energy held in West Cumbria. At first the contact between the schools was by an exchange of student letters. Then, two years later, the first group of Brampton students went out to visit Uru North. The following year Uru students came to Brampton. These visits have continued on a two-year cycle and 1999 saw the tenth anniversary of that first visit. The link continues to grow from strength to strength. Besides the regular student group exchanges, individual students and teachers from both schools and members of both communities and organisations within them have also become directly involved.

One independent outcome of the initial school link was the development of a small tourist business to raise funds to help agricultural development in Uru North. It used the estate bungalows at the Machare coffee estate in Uru North and gave tourists an opportunity to see real Tanzanian village life for themselves as well as climb Kilimanjaro, go on a wildlife safari or visit Zanzibar. Profits from the tourism enabled the establishment of a bull project (now a BTT project) and the upgrading of the Machare road.

Although the holidays are no longer operating, by the end of 1998 over 270 people from all over the UK and Europe had visited the area. Many became involved in writing to and supporting different projects within Uru North - schools, dispensaries, a local bus service, the construction of a maize mill and many more. They wanted to keep their contact with Uru North so at the end of 1998 Brampton Tanzania Trust was established from both these contacts and those made via the school link.

Brampton Tanzania Trust has achieved remarkable things in the ten years of its existence. Please have a look at what we have done and will be doing in the future and do make contact if you wish to share in the enterprise.