October 28, 2015

All in all my recent trip to Tanzania was invigorating. This summer TFFT’s Leadership Team examined the strategic plan and its findings. We determined our priorities for the next five years and in September we started mapping out an implementation plan. As I elaborated on in my last post, this plan addresses the changing context of education and vulnerability in Tanzania. Today I will share how our plan challenges us to strive for greater impact and to measure our contribution, in addition to our attribution.

We’ve always struggled with the idea of scaling our work, for fear of compromising the integrity of our programs. However, nine years in, our programs are in a place where they are ready to scale. In fact, at this point, scaling  them will strengthen our work.

As our team discussed our impact, Dr. McAlpine challenged us to look beyond our attribution, to our contribution. Attribution considers the direct results of a program. Did the program cause the intended immediate outcomes? Contribution casts a wider net and includes the indirect results of a program. Contribution is the ripple effect. The ripple effect is what grassroots change is all about–start with a seed, end with a forest. We spent our first nine years refining our seeds. Now we’re walking in the forest.

Take our Teachers Training Program for example. We need to understand our work beyond the direct change in the teachers who go through our training. The teacher we trained this year have since impacted thousands of students, who experienced a change in understanding, engagement, and behaviour as a result. We have begun to account for our partners’ and stakeholders’ behavioural changes as well as the direct outcomes of our interventions.

Our Scholarship Program is contributing self-reliant, dedicated, and driven leaders to society. Our Teachers Training Program’s contribution includes TFFT trained teachers who cascade trainings to fellow educators in their district, independent of TFFT. The contribution of our child rights trainings and Happy and Sad Boxes are children who know their rights and protect them by writing notes celebrating positive interactions and reporting negative ones.

Nine years in, I could not be more proud of our work and our trajectory. We are thinking big, but when you work side by side with passionate individuals committed to changing the state of this world, it is easy to persevere; it is easy to work late, study excel files for hours, and drive long distances on bumpy roads to observe classrooms. Stay tuned and let us know how you want to be involved. You are part of this crazy awesome group of people who make up the TFFT Family and have made this all happen!