Background info: TFFT welcomes new children into our scholarship program every year and guarantees education, health, and emotional support through the equivalent high school graduation. One of the most frequently asked questions is how we choose which children become TFFT scholars. In this post Uswege shares some of his personal experience with this selection process.

Being orphaned and vulnerable interferes with a child’s ability to exercise his or her right to education. TFFT’s orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) identification and selection is a very sensitive step toward securing quality education and providing emotional support for Tanzania’s most vulnerable children. In this blog, I am going to try to share with you some of the experiences accumulated from the 2014 OVC identification process.

For the first time this year we expanded the selection process from just our partner orphanages to the greater community. We did this because, contrary to what you might think, we discovered that sometimes the children in the orphanages were not the most vulnerable in society. When we looked closely, we saw children in the villages living in even more threatening and dangerous circumstances than some of the children in the orphanages. Therefore, we needed to develop more specific criteria for identifying and selecting the most vulnerable and orphaned children. To do this we communicated closely with our partner organization to learn from them the best practice for identifying the most vulnerable children.

The next step took us out of our office to the community for the actual work of OVC identification. We knew from our past experience that this was going to be bittersweet because of the large pool of orphaned and vulnerable children we had to choose from. Have you ever been in a position where wish you could help everyone? In one way or another, I am sure that most of us have experienced this. In this case, it happened when we visited Ungalimited Primary School, a school with more than 2000 students, where 300 of them are orphaned children who can’t afford to buy school uniform, exercise books, shoes and cannot attend classes every day because they have to involve themselves in child labor to get money for food.

When we stepped our feet out of Arusha town to Arumeru district, the OVC’s status was even worse, including meeting with a fifteen year old boy who was applying for a scholarship for his 11 year old brother. Following the death of their parents, the boys have no one to support them, so the older brother decided to sacrifice his own schooling and to instead work as a child laborer in a maize (corn) factory so that he could earn a little money for food and rent and to buy school materials for his brother.

This child exemplifies a lot of child-headed houses in Tanzania, where older siblings sacrifice their future career and get involved in child labor so that their young sisters and brothers can have something to eat.

This identification stage of OVC’s selection ended in Ilkiding’a Ward, where we met four different grandparents and one handicapped women applying for scholarship for her handicapped child who could not attend school around the area because of not having school infrastructure for handicapped children.

These are just two of the many stories that we heard during the OVC identification process. The good news is that we are welcoming 10 children into our scholarship program, including the children from the two stories mentioned here.

Thank you so much for reading this, thank you so much for being a part of The Foundation For Tomorrow’s Family. See you next time when we will be sharing with you more about our new scholars who get the chance to join the The Foundation For Tomorrow’s big family.