By Finance and Archives Committee

Each month we like to share the story of where your thank offering has gone in recent years. This spring we’ll share with you updates from our 2023 grant sites as they are about halfway through with their project year. This month, an update on the Youth Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation Program in Tanzania.

Please tell us how the project is going?

The project is going on well. Eighteen mentors were recruited and trained. There are 17 active groups with 973 participants comprising recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, sex commercial workers, vulnerable youth, ex-convicts, and those serving community service orders. The groups are meeting once every week for group therapy and training. Some groups have started common activities to keep them engaged, like tree nurseries. Apart from the mentors, there are other community resource people who are volunteering their services to give psychosocial support to the participants. The participants have started selecting the job-training skills they would like to acquire to enable them to earn livelihoods in the future and will begin those classes in January 2024.

Please share with us one of your biggest success stories so far? 

One group which has been taken through the process of rehabilitation has launched an income-generating project of a tree nursery with 600 seedlings. They took the initiative of making it a success so that gradually and progressively it may be of importance to them and the community that surrounds them. The land on which they undertook the activity was donated by one of the Christian leaders in their local church. This is a way of encouragement and pushing forth the agenda of the program’s greater good and achieving its mission and vision.

Another success story is on Joseph N. He suffered from abuse of alcohol, drugs and other substances. This led to breakage of his family and loss of valuable things that he had. The program came in handy and took him through the process of training and rehabilitation. As of now, he has realized himself and he is a reformed man in the society; he mended his relationship with his family and he is re-strategizing his life’s purpose and vision to become the best version of himself.

If you found this story as inspiring as we did, we hope you’ll make a donation to UTO so we can fund projects just like this one in 2025.