What is the Children’s Eco Village?

In 2012, Islamic Help set up the Children's Eco Village in the Mkuranga District of Tanzania, 40km south of Dar es Salaam. The village is a ground-breaking initiative designed to promote environmental sustainability and provide a stable and loving home for orphaned and vulnerable girls. It provides a safe, supportive, and healing natural environment for the girls who live there, whilst modelling a sustainable way of living through the on-site permaculture farm, eco-mosque, and specialised eco home design. There are currently 12 girls living on-site, cared for by 2 ‘house mamas’.

Why is it needed?

Tanzania has almost 2.6 million orphans, the majority of which are due to HIV/AIDS. Over 40% of Tanzanians live below the poverty line, the vast majority of these in rural and semi-rural areas like Kisemvule. With the average family struggling to meet their basic needs, widows and extended families often struggle to care for orphaned children. Opportunities for women and girls are still relatively restricted, with barriers to education a major problem. On top of this, vulnerability to natural disasters is high in this part of Africa, and climate change is already having significant impacts including extreme weather, unpredictable wet and dry seasons, and reduced crop viability.

Community Led and Knowledge Sharing

Although the project is overseen from the UK, the day-to-day team on the ground is increasingly demonstrating strong capacity, ownership, and independence. Recent recruitment of highly motivated and skilled staff, and partnership with the Tanzanian NGO HUDEFO, has significantly strengthened the organisation’s ability to make informed decisions locally. These team members bring initiative, vision and a deep understanding of the girls’ lived realities. This allows the project to move steadily towards greater self-sufficiency and community-led leadership.

Moreover, the resident girls themselves are becoming active participants. They have established a resident-led committee that meets regularly to celebrate progress, raise concerns and identify emerging needs. This committee is facilitated by the project’s Social Worker to provide a safe, structured platform for the girls to voice their experiences and in turn shape project activities. Through this participatory approach, the girls can gain confidence, leadership skills, and a stronger sense of agency within their own environment.

With the involvement of international specialists in the architectural elements of the project, local staff, construction professionals, university students and trainees are learning environmental architecure and construction at the forefront of where it is being developed. Scientific monitoring equipment installed on-site to quantify the successes of the naturally ventilated buildings is contributing to academic research in the UK and Tanzania.

Community Supporting

It is very important to us that the project does not just benefit the girls and staff who live and work on-site. Although living and working at the Children’s Eco Village makes a huge difference to those who live and work there, the impact we can have working with the wider community is much greater. Some examples of working with the wider community that have happened in the last 2 years are:

4 environmental festivals celebrating key Islamic holidays. Each event involved 100 local families and covered topics including making bio-fertiliser and bio-pesticides; discussing Islamic teachings around the environment; and examples of income generating upcycling projects.
A weekly educational club for local children. Each week, up to 220 children come to our Friday Eco Club, held after Jummah prayers on Friday afternoons. Children learn about different environment-related topics each weeks, including tree planting, waste management, water conservation, and skills in sustainable farming. Children have a light meal after their class and play at the Eco Village playground.
2 professional workshops for local government staff, training them on Tanzanian legislation surrounding environmental responsibilities, and supporting in the setup of the local Climate Change Committee.
Numerous local cleanups, food distribution, sale of surplus crops to locals, school supplies distributions, individual support, road repairs, and more.

Measuring Success

A project that has so many facets can make measuring success difficult without becoming atomised. We are collecting detailed quantitative data on building performance; hearing quarterly updates from the girls through our Children’s Committee; constantly listening to feedback from staff to improve the programme; and producing annual reports of achievements.

But the success criteria we are the proudest of is our work towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Through our existing programmes, and those planned to take place in the next 5 years (see below section), we are working towards all 17 SDGs! It is very uncommon to find this is one project, and shows that we are effectively working towards the goal of providing a genuine model of an living in harmony with the earth, whilst also improving quality of life in one of the world’s poorest regions.

The Future

In the next 5 years, the Children’s Eco Village aims to become a hub for Regenerative Living in East Africa. We have 2 major upcoming projects in this period:

The retrofit of 4 existing homes to accomodate an additional 36 children, provide staff office and meeting space, and offer basic visitor accomodation. Houses 1-4 at the Eco Village were built in around 2013 but have not lasted well due to quality issues and lack of environmentally sensitive design. They were built to provide housing for 10 girls and a mother per house, but are currently not able to be used due to health and safety concerns. With the success of House 5, we will be retrofitting the existing houses to bring them up to an equal standard of comfort and safety. This will involve:

Window bay installation- full height, insect protected screen windows providing ventilation through the building

Internal ventilation to increase air flow through the building

New roof, optimised to be shading, heat shedding, and ventilating

New robust ceilings

Solar panels for electricity generation

Shading screens to cool external walls

Trench arch composting sewage systems
Change of building layout to add a shaded walled garden and covered area

2. Constructing a brand new Eco-School
We aim to build a primary school on the Eco-Village site that will educate the 50 girls resident in the village, as well as 150 additional children from the local community. The school will deliver a groundbreaking environmental curriculum which will build on the well-rounded Tanzanian National Curriculum to embed a deep connection with nature and the environment; and will teach age-appropriate practical sustainability skills. The curriculum will be supported by Muslim teachings around environmental stewardship of the Earth.

The school building will build on experience from House 5, which uses exciting new design to provide a naturally cool, secure, and attractive environment without the use of air-conditioning. The school will be made up of 3 blocks, consisting of 7 classrooms, lunch/break out areas, outdoor learning space, kitchen, storage, reception space, office, workshop, staff room, and 3 toilet blocks. There will also be outdoor classrooms and a forest school area set up in an adjoining area of the eco-village site.

The ecologically responsible building will be a learning tool in and of itself, and the potential for growth of the school and development of the site will provide extensive training opportunities for students and members of the local community (including during its construction). Outside of school times, the building will provide learning spaces for the local community, providing comfortable spaces for adult education. An on-site campsite will facilitate residential visits from other schools, spreading sustainability education quickly through existing educational networks.

Education will take place both in classrooms and around the Eco Village site. Natural learning environments develop a connection with nature that lasts throughout life and improve outcomes for the child. Teaching will be child-centred and influenced by Forest School and Outdoor Education approaches.

By bringing education to the forefront of the goals of the Eco-Village, we will empower students to go on to develop and implement adaptations that will mitigate the impacts of climate change in Tanzania.