The East Africa Regional Coordinator is responsible for the management and oversight of all G.E.P.’s activities in our two Africa divisions (Kenya and Tanzania). Our mission is to provide low-income youth with access to the educational resources needed to become self-sufficient. Current programs focus on entrepreneurship training and micro-finance for young people (mid teens to late 20s), many of who are dropouts or unemployed secondary school graduates. For more information, please see

Just 16 years old, Francine Afsa has lived more than a quarter of her life in this refugee camp in western Tanzania. She has been here with her parents, nine brothers and two sisters since 1999, having already spent a short time in Tanzania as a refugee in 1996 when a Tutsi-led rebellion broke out in her homeland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire). She regards her future in the camp bleakly: "It will get worse and worse. There is no hope for my life. I'm like someone who's in jail."

Fewer than 1,000 Rwandan refugees remain in Tanzania - roughly 700 in Ngara and 300 in Kibondo - with returns continuing, according to Ivana Unluova, the spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The German government will, through its technical and financial cooperation bodies, provide Tanzania with US $86.12 million worth of aid over the next three years. At least half the money would be spent on water and sanitation projects, but there would also be significant contributions towards health projects and budgetary support, Detles Mey, the Tanzania country director of the German government's aid agency, the Gersellschaft fuer Technische Zumsammenarbeit (GTZ), told IRIN.

A Rwandan government delegation is in Tanzania to brief Rwandan refugees on voluntary repatriation, government-owned Radio Rwanda reported on Friday. It said the delegates were in the Ngara and Kibondo districts in the northwestern Kagera Region, where about 2,600 Rwandans are living in refugee camps.

Tanzania's first annual home-grown human rights report has highlighted continued abuses of police power, low levels of awareness about human rights, abuses of economic and cultural rights and the tabling of several constricting bills in parliament amongst its major concerns.

Locals get almost nothing out of conservation accrued benefits. There is much talk on the need for wildlife neighbouring communities to share the benefits of wildlife conservation. This loud cry is neither supported by enforceable legislation nor by clearly spelt out Government policies. To Government functionaries, it is enough to proudly talk of the earnings from wildlife and highlight it as a percentage of the national income. But if the successes of conservation in terms of the welfare of rural people in and/or adjacent to wildlife-protected areas are gauged, obviously they are failure. Yet the villages in and around protected areas have little or almost no Government-supported infrastructures, argues this commentary.

Tanzania is scheduled to receive €24 million (US $26 million) from the EC this year to help meet the humanitarian needs of Burundian and Congolese refugees in the country, according to the EC Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO).

Chief Secretary Marten Lumbanga has claimed it is untrue that corruption was on the increase. Speaking at the closing of a one-day conference on 'Good Governance' at the Courtyard Hotel, Dar es Salaam, he said the corruption index in Tanzania had fallen from 81 points to 71, according to Transparency International.

Senior Muslim figures who recently underwent voluntary HIV tests were praised this week by health officials for "leading by example, rather than just talking about what people should do". The leaders, who included 14 sheikhs, imams and religious teachers from around Tanzania, chose to undergo the tests following a meeting earlier this month, during which Muslims discussed their role in the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.

The governments of Sweden and the United Republic of Tanzania signed an agreement on 31 January under which Sweden will provide 455 million kronor (US $50 million) to support Tanzania's 2003-06 Primary Education Development Plan.

Starting this week, refugees in Tanzanian camps will have their rations cut by up to 50 percent due to the lack of any "major food contributions" over the last six months, an employee of the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday. "Our pipeline is running on empty," Mario Leeflang, WFP pipeline officer, told IRIN from the Tanzanian commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.

On 25 January 2003, photojournalist Hamis Hamad, who works for the daily "Uhuru" and weekly "Mzalendo" newspapers in Dar es Salaam, was reportedly assaulted by Kinondoni Municipal Council askaris (security guards).

The Iringa International School is in search of several full-time Primary and Secondary School teachers. These are full-time, 35 hour a week, multi-subject teaching schedules. The hours are, generally, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday-Thursday, and 8 to 1:30 Fridays. Applicants must be passionate and experienced in the subject area, for which they are applying, disciplined workers, creative, team players, and above all caring teachers.

Through an article about AGOA you published recently, I learnt about your excellent web site. I am a Tanzanian citizen, a strong believer in social justice. I am also the co-coordinator of an informal group called Indigenous Rights for Survival International (IRSI). IRSI is a loose network of young people with an interest in public policy issues in Africa. We mainly discuss policy issues through email and ultimately write articles in the press. I am sending you this letter (available through the link below), which I wrote to the President of the United Republic of Tanzania calling on him to stop the violation of fundamental human rights in Loliondo Division of Ngorongoro, Tanzania.

The involvement of women in the on-going Burundi peace talks is a reflection of their general position in society. The initial battle for women's inclusion by mainly the urban based, educated women, enabled them to enter the peace talks, albeit long after they had started. But even today women are primarily observers of the process. They can participate directly in the discussions but have no right to vote on any motion. Read about the experiences of African women at the East Africa Media Women's Website.

Tanzania has launched an initiative to raise the performance of girls in science examinations and to encourage more girls to study science subjects at school. The project involves holding intensive science-training camps for girls, and also training science teachers how to encourage girls to learn about science.

Urgently required to manage a large operation which provides community service and health programmes for over 130,000 Congolese refugees in three camps, and a community development programme in western Tanzania.

Norway on Tuesday challenged the G-7 countries to follow its example and significantly increase their commitments to education initiatives in the developing world. Hilde Johnson, Norway's Minister for International Development, said this would be the only way of meeting the Dakar Declaration commitments, through which the international community undertook to ensure that no country that attempted to provide education for all its citizens would lack the resources to do so.

When a Canadian multinational took over control of a peasant gold mine in 1996 they had one problem - it was the lifeblood of a local community of peasant miners. Since then, what happened to the local miners who were deep in the shafts of the mine when the Vancouver-based company sent in the bulldozers has been a matter of controversy. The evidence that has surfaced since 1996 - ranging from a firestorm of memos and reports to disputed photographs and videos which may show the dead bodies of exhumed peasant miners - has inspired human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu to lead a growing number who say an independent inquiry is the only way to put this matter to rest, says this investigative piece from www.zmag.org.