July 11, 2017

During the June school holiday, eight scholars from our Peer Mentoring Program had the opportunity to join an Innovation Capacity Building Workshop to get their young minds thinking in a new way, and their hands working with new materials. The participants went to a five-day technical workshop with a local Arushian NGO called Twende, which means ‘let’s go’ in Kiswahili. They built prototypes of particular tools that could help them solve various problems in daily life. The scholars thought of an original idea and the Twende facilitators gave them step-by-step instructions to bring their ideas to life using recycled materials.

The feedback from the instructors at Twende was encouraging to hear. They said our scholars showed a lot of curiosity, cooperation, hard work, and respect for the teachers. They all came on time and there was 100% participation. This shows that they were very engaged with the activity.

On the final day of the workshop, the scholars presented their work to the larger group and interested parties who had gathered to see their progress. One TFFT group designed a way of recycling unused soap. The other TFFT group designed a vegetable cutting machine that would shorten the time of food preparation. They proudly presented their original designs, their work flow diagrams, and a demonstration of their final products.

We hope that this hands-on creative workshop will help our scholars look at the world in a new way. Perhaps they will be more curious as to how things work! They will be more likely to feel that they can come up with new ways of solving old problems, have greater confidence in working with their hands, and appreciating how much fun it can be to be innovative.