Speeches Shim
Forty-nine-year-old Babeli is a mason in his village. He is also a peer educator for those who, like him, are living with HIV. His calling to become a peer educator was borne from a deep sense of empathy toward others.
It’s Friday morning in Hembeti, a rural village in eastern Tanzania, and Irene Lemelo is hard at work. Members of the local community update her on their progress digging trenches for water pipes, and Lemelo answers their questions about a gravity-fed water system now under construction. When she finished her engineering degree a year ago, Lemelo never anticipated working with water projects. But after finding an internship with USAID’s Water Resources Integration Development Initiative (WARIDI), she now wants to make water the focus of her professional career.
Resilient and grateful is how Shole, a mother of two in the Arusha region of Tanzania, describes herself. She is also HIV-positive. “I discovered I was positive in 2012 while pregnant with my third child,” she explained. “I was devastated to receive my results. I shared the news with my husband who didn’t take it very well. He decided to leave me and my children without any support. However, I delivered the [third] child safely. Sadly, after six months, my baby died.”
In rural Tanzania, women and girls bear the greatest burden when water is scarce and sanitation and hygiene are poor. Yet their needs are often not represented in community decision-making on water and sanitation. Even when women are members of village and water governance institutions, social norms sanction women for speaking in public and keep them from participating fully.
After trainings from Advancing Youth on establishing youth lending and savings groups, a young man from Rungwe, Southern Tanzania established three youth-focused credit associations, vied for a position as loan manager for his district’s youth development fund – and won!
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