Tumaini Fund

The Tumaini Fund is a charity which began in Guernsey in 2003, taking its name from the Swahili word "Tumaini" meaning Hope. It aims to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Biblical imperative to care for widows and orphans. 

Its objective is to support the AIDS orphans, the widows and widowers, in the impoverished and remote Kagera Region of North-West Tanzania: promoting their health and education, improving their water-supplies, sanitation and nutrition - including supplying milk to babies whose Mum's have died - and providing our families with mosquito nets to prevent malaria - the biggest killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa. The Tumaini Fund enables orphans to access nursery school and government primary and secondary schools, high school, technical colleges and university.

The Tumaini Fund runs vocational training classes for orphans who have dropped from education, usually because of ill-health: 5 for tailoring and 5 for carpentry. Our students are given a 2 year course in their chosen skill and also receive Mathematics and English lessons as they would have received at secondary school and Entrepreneurship classes. When they are sufficiently skilled, our tailoring students make, amongst other items, many primary school uniforms for our younger orphans and our carpentry students make doors and windows for the houses we construct for destitute families. In thanks for their efforts, every tailoring student graduates with the treadle sewing-machine that they had been training on and the carpentry students graduate with a box of tools - these enable the orphans to immediately set up their own small businesses.

The Tumaini Fund is currently supporting 212,000 orphans, with 134,000 in primary schools, 36,000 in secondary and high schools, 230 in our vocational training schools and 444 in university.

The Tumaini Fund has a shallow well project to deliver clean safe water to the villages in which our orphans live. Many children's lives are lost every year through drinking infected water from the contaminated surface water supplies used by most villages. We build 20-30 wells each year which each bring clean water to often 1000 villagers. The wells are looked after by a caretaker, managed by the village's Water Users' Group and water-rates are levied in the villages to pay the caretaker and pay for any repairs needed - AIDS families and the families of the disabled are exempted from paying rates. 

The Tumaini Fund also has a house-building project to provide decent safe housing to our families who were homeless or else living in desperately squalid conditions. We build about 20 houses each year and we have recently added water-harvesting to the houses to enable families to have their own water on-site.