PWC

The Pastoral Women's Council is one of the few indigenous women-led pastoralist organisations in Tanzania. Pastoralists are semi-nomadic livestock keepers, the best known being the Maasai. It was founded in 1997 as a Community-Based Organisation, by its current Director Maanda Ngoitiko, a Maasai women herself. Since then PWC have listened and learned from Maasai women and developed projects based on their wants and needs. They now have around 3700 members; local, national and international donors; and key partners that help contribute to their work and is currently run by eighteen full time staff and twenty volunteers.

PWC’s Vision is to promote sound cultural, political, environmental and educational development of pastoralist women and children to facilitate their access to essential social services and economic empowerment. They are guided in their work by principles of solidarity, equality, trust and transparency.

African Initiatives and PWC work together on a number of projects around girl’s education as well as a women’s rights and empowerment project. They also support their land rights campaign. The main education project is funded by DFID, and works to improve girl’s access to secondary education, through various capacity building and awareness raising activities.

In addition, DFID also fund a three year primary school education project which aims to increase girl’s representation and attendance at school from an early age.  This new, innovative project aims to change attitudes towards educating girls through traditional methods of Maasai communication using song and dance. The project will also be carried out in conjunction with a pilot study of evening classes for children who aren’t able to attend school during the day therefore giving these young people who have not had a traditional education a chance to gain some basic skills.

African Initiatives also supports an on-going girl’s education programme with PWC. The project provides support for both nursery and primary schools, implements an extensive education and advocacy campaign promoting girls education, provides secondary school scholarships around 40 girls annually and finally supports the management of their own secondary school in the heart of Maasai territory.

The final key focus to PWC’s work is supporting pastoralist communities in their fight against the government, and tourism and hunting organisations to maintain control and access to their land, which is vital to their ability to maintain a sustainable livelihood. African Initiatives support PWC in this work through campaigning and raising awareness of these issues in the UK.