Our Current Projects

Please note that all volunteer team project goals are developed with our local partner organizations who identify the projects most important to them and their communities. However, we have given a brief indication of what project goals are likely to include for each project site.

Tanzania Schools Project

This is a 'poverty alleviation through education' project which helps improve educational facilities for Tanzanian children by building and renovating schools & educational facilities in Babati near Lake Manyara.

Partners: The Livingstone Tanzania Trust (www.livingstonetanzaniatrust.com) believes that education is not just about students in schools and ought to include the whole community.

Aims: This project helps improve educational facilities for Tanzanian children by building and renovating schools & educational facilities in Babati near Lake Manyara. We are working with the Livingstone Tanzania Trust to:

help renovate existing buildings (cement floors, plaster the walls, put in windows, doors and new desks, give the teachers shelves for their books),
build new buildings from scratch,
develop and improve the use of English through English conversation groups up and the installment of language labs,
improve the sporting facilities,
develop school income generation schemes to ensure greater self reliance and sustainability.

Partners: Inspire's Directors have been working with charity The Livingstone Tanzania Trust since 2007,after being approached by Julian Page, the founding Trustee.

Key Features: Interaction with the community. Working with children and teachers in schools in rural Africa. Work on school farms. Option to add on 1/2 day safari and cultural tours.

Potential Projects: Work with the local community and skilled workers to build a fish pond, chicken coup, or renovate a crumbling classroom building.

Malawi Orphans & Community Project

By working closely with rural & township communities in Malawi this project helps to develop and improve living conditions for Malawian children & their families.

Aims: To provide volunteer support to self-help community groups in the Pen Sulo district of Blantyre in Malawi, and to apply volunteer donations to sustainable development through construction of feeding stations, school buildings, developing tree-planting, school scholarship funds and related projects to improve the livelihoods of the rural communities.

Partners: Inspire Directors met with the charity Joshua Orphan and Community Care (www.joshuainmalawi.org.uk) in 2005. Since then many volunteer projects have been successfully run working with the local community and its staff to improve the lives of orphans in the locality.

Key Features: Interaction with the community and orphan children. Working with children and local communities on educational, health and development projects in rural Africa. Option to add on 1/2 day safari or kayaking on Lake Malawi.

Potential Projects: Renovate a crumbing feeding centre building which provides the orphan children with one meal a day.

Kenya Water Relief Project

This project helps the local Kamba people in Kenya to improve their access to water by constructing small-scale sand dams.

Aims: To work with charity partner Excellent Development (www.excellentdevelopment.com) to enable disadvantaged communities in Africa to transform their environment sustainably and improve water supplies, food production, health and incomes. The communities Excellent work with face many difficulties in their day to day lives, particularly the lack of water and food shortages. Women and children are often forced to walk for up to 12 hours a day to collect water.

Sand dams are simple concrete structures built across seasonal river beds. They each can store up to 10 million litres of water year round, giving people a continuous clean water source. The surrounding vegetation also flourishes from the rise in the water table providing fertile soils for crop growing and tree planting.

Partners: Inspire Directors have worked with Excellent Development for over 4 years to help fund the building of sand dams in rural regions south of Nairobi. Volunteer teams provide the financial help to build the dams, but also physical support in actually constructing them.

Key Features: Interaction with the community. Groups work alongside up to 100 members of the local community when constructing the sand dams.

Potential Projects: Assist the local community to build a sand-dam providing water for over 1,200 local people.

Swaziland Community and Environment Project

Set in the African bush, this project supports valuable community and conservation work to ensure the long-term protection of wildlife in Southern Africa.

Aims: To improve the infrastructure of local communities and help with the improving environmental education to the children of the northern Lubombo Conservancy, so that these important conservation areas and their wildlife can be preserved for the use of future generations.

Partners: The Shewula Community and Nature Reserve is a product of cooperation between the Shewula community and the neighbouring game reserves of Mlawula and Mbuluzi.

The community has set aside 2650ha of land for conservation (the Shewula Nature Reserve) and has a tourism camp to enable income generation for the community. The projects undertaken have worked with the four main reserves (private, government and community run) that constitute the Lubombo Conservancy, helping them to work together towards the shared goal of conservation in Swaziland.

Key Features: Interaction with the community and orphan children. Working with wardens and guides in to run environmental education projects for local children. Option to add on safari, rafting, horse-riding.

Potential Projects: Improving classrooms for local communities and work with local Game Rangers to runenvironmental education programmes for local children in their neighbouring Game Reserves.

Uganda School Education

Our partner charity, DEOMA, is based in western Uganda and supports the development of infrastructure for the children and communities of Bweyale.

Aims: Improving schools and educational infrastructure

Uganda child Partners: DEOMA (www.deoma.org) is a charity set up by Ugandan Florence Ochola in memory of her daughter Diane Elizabeth who died tragically young. Florence is from Uganda but currently works in the UK as a teaching assistant. She has dedicated her life to helping the communities and children in the north-west of Uganda, in the small and friendly community of Bweyale.

Key features: There is a primary school in the area but it is 3km away and accessible only via a very busy and dangerous road. The only secondary school is yet further down this road, about 7km away. DEOMA set up a small nursery in 2008 and also runs adult education programmes. They are now planning to build a primary school, a secondary school and then hopefully a vocational training school.

Potential projects: DEOMA has been able to purchase a piece of land on which to build the primary school. Volunteers are now needed to raise funds and come out and build the classrooms, staff houses, kitchens, latrines and water tanks that are so urgently needed to get the school up and running. Once the building is in place, then the government will provide and fund teaching staff for the school.

INDIA

Goa's Slum Children

Our partner in Goa runs educational and welfare projects for children from the slums of Goa in south-western India.

Aims: To break the cycle of illiteracy and child labour, which keeps these children and their families in poverty.

Partners: The Educator's Trust (www.educatorstrustindia.org) is a UK and Indian registered charity. They work to assist children and their families who flock here from other parts of India, looking for work and opportunities that they think Goa will offer them. Unfortunately this is rarely, if ever the case. Children often end up begging on the beaches, picking up litter or perhaps selling jewellery and peanuts to earn a few rupees.

Key features: As well as teaching English, Maths, Science and crafts at their own informal slum schools, ET also run mobile educational projects and health clinics to educate the children and their parents about hygiene, health and nutrition. All the children they work with including those who have progressed and now attend state school are provided with a daily meal, a supply of fresh drinking water, fruit and milk.

Potential projects: Renovation of the ET's slum schools and building of their new boarding school. Assisting with the informal educational work of ET in the informal schools and on the mobile clinics.

Add-on an activities

We have a number of different activities in place that take-in the highlights of your project and the surrounding region as well as places off the beaten track. Our UK staff have all spent years overseas so are experts at putting together ideas based on the time your group have as well as type of activity you want. Lake Malawi trip

Sample activities that can be added on to an Africa based project include:

Safari to the Ngorogoro Crater
White water rafting on the Usutu River
Dolphin watching on the Kenyan Coast
Climbing Mount Kenya
Trekking in Swaziland
Canoe safaris on Lake Malawi
Scuba diving with Whale Sharks in the Indian Ocean