CASEC

The Community Aid and Small Enterprises Consultancy is a small NGO based in Arusha, northern Tanzania. Established in 1994, it promotes human and social development as the foundation for tackling poverty and injustice. CASEC originated from OXFAM-GB’s capacity building programme which aimed at building the capacity of local communities and partners in enabling them to address their poverty and injustice issues, with focus on marginalised groups such as women, youths, disabled, and children.

Since its initiation, CASEC has been involved in building the capacity of communities, partners and similar minded stakeholders. The emphasis has been to address poverty and injustices through participatory assessments, evaluations, trainings, technical advisory services, and community support in kind and money. This is achieved by providing training, research and consultancy services for local government, community leaders and NGOs, as well as undertaking their own development projects and advocacy activities which in recent years has become a much larger party of their work. The Director of CASEC is Alfred Sakafu who is very well known and respected in the development sector and was the former country Director for Oxfam in Tanzania.

AI and CASEC work together on a number of girls' education projects, two of which are funded by Comic Relief and DFID. The projects work to improve girl’s access to secondary education, through improving the physical infrastructure in the form of dormitories for girls to stay in, and also through many capacity building and awareness raising activities such as training school boards. There is also a project focused on establishing girls clubs in schools to help increase girls’ self confidence and provide a safe place for them to discuss the issues and challenges they are facing.

AI also supports CASEC in some of their other projects, including a youth at risk project, which is focused around supporting a local youth centre located in a very poor area in the Arusha city. Finally they support a HIV and AIDS Education and Prevention Campaign which works directly with ten secondary schools in Arusha City each year, where student peer educators are recruited and reaches over 12,000 students annually.