In the Beginning

The MDFT front yard before the brain storm

At Making a Difference Foundation Primary School (MDFT), we have one objective:  To create an education model that can make a profound and lasting impact in our students's lives in order to transform their future.  We have lofty goals of educating Tanzanian's next scientist, business entrepreneurs, social developers and decision makers.

Our immediate problems are as as follows:

1. Our source of income depends on what a few parents can pay as school fees, charities and luck!
2. Many parents cannot afford our school fees but we cannot turn away students in need
3. Our classrooms are very crowded and we desperately need to expand
4. We lack traditional school essentials like textbooks, notebooks, pencils, labs and resources, etc
5. We do not have a way to ensure that our students are getting nutritious brain food and all we can provide for them is a cup of watered down porridge every day.
6. We so not have a way of impacting our community to create community support
7. We lack professional development opportunities for our teachers and staff

So one day we began to brain storm to see how we could resolve our problems.  Since part of our aim is to teach our students how to find resources and work to become self-sufficient, we as a school had to learn how to practice what we intend to preach.

We decided to create a school farm in our unused front yard as the simple answer to many our problems.  The school farm would help us diversify our income, start a parent cooperative where they could exchange sweat equity for school fees, create outdoor classrooms to lessen overcrowding within the traditional 4 walls, replace the immediate need for traditional books, labs and other conventional resources (the farm is the best textbook!!), introduce a better diet for our school meals program, create Kitchen Garden models to spread to our community the idea of growing one's own food in a crowded, low income urban setting, and among many, many other things, create a place were our teachers could learn and innovate their lessons and skills every day!

We decided to call our little farm the FLOOD GARDEN because we intend to flood our community with children who are skilled and able to take up the current economic slack and help fix the immediate issues in their own communities.   We also want to FLOOD the community with innovative ways to improve their diet, income and budgets from the ideas of our little urban farm.

Our over-crowded classrooms

PLEASE FOLLOW OUR STORY OF HOW WE MEAN TO MEET OUR LOFTY GOALS.