Kwetu Faraja

Kwetu Faraja’s objective is to provide opportunities for orphans and vulnerable children to escape the life of poverty and to become independent, well-adjusted, contributing members of society. Since beginning this work, the organization has provided housing and education for 63 street children, of whom 12 have now completed secondary education and have gone to find work to build lives for themselves, 6 have gone to complete university education, and 5 have completed vocational training. Thirty of these children are still living on our campus and continue in their various levels of education. In addition to those children who live on our campus, Kwetu Faraja has provided various levels of assistance, medical care, and advocacy to over 1,000 street children.

Our Background

Kwetu Faraja Inc., located in Mwanza, Tanzania, was started in 2008 as a grass-roots initiative led by former street children in partnership with an international community development worker/missionary (Executive Director, Lorien Knapp) to provide holistic care to orphans and vulnerable children who were living in the streets of their community. The organization received National registration in 2012 as an NGO in Tanzania and as a 501(c)3 Public Charity in USA (Indiana).

Our organization was born because there was an obvious need in our community, and few organizations truly working to address that need. We observed many groups exploiting vulnerable children and causing greater harm than good. While many NGO’s seek to profit from the misfortunes of street children, we seek to serve them with love and encouragement so they can recognize their personal worth, grow into adults who desire to make a difference, and to be the new face of Africa.

Our initial work in 2008 was an outreach program to provide some of the basic immediate needs of street children such as food, clothing, education assistance, counseling, medical care and advocacy. In our first few months of the program we interacted with over 700 different street children. When possible we would return children to live with family members, but we quickly learned that there were children who had no place to go and needed a permanent home. In 2009 we decided to provide a greater level of care for some of the children, so we rented a room for a few boys to live in and we put them into a local school. Very quickly we had children knocking down our door asking for a chance as well. We continued renting more rooms, but recognized that our program was not sustainable. We began looking for other organizations that shared our vision and goals so that we could partner with them, but discovered that our mission was vastly different than the missions of other similar organizations. Merging philosophies for street outreach is a difficult task, so we decided to plow new fields and start fresh.

In 2012 we were finally able to formally register our organization both in Tanzania and in USA. This has opened many new doors for meaningful work to take place. The number of children being reached, and the scope of programs that are being implemented has increased. In addition to having more diverse programs, the quality of the care for our children has become more like a family environment where we offer greater supervision, mentoring, and care.

Our Future

The future at Kwetu Faraja is an abiding hope in the gifts, resiliency, and promise of our children. The future is a collaboration with partners of vision and compassion. We want to eradicate the hopelessness of street children in Tanzania, by raising them up in a family, educating them, and binding their emotional wounds. Kwetu Faraja is an example-in-action of one response to the tragedy of abandoned and orphaned children in Tanzania. It remains for us to add a campus for girls and to reach out to the Islands of Lake Victoria teeming with vulnerable children. We are raising a generation of children who can be a new conscience and future leadership for our country; leadership committed to caring for the most valuable resource of any nation – it’s children. The poverty of Tanzania is not great enough to diminish our will to work toward this worthy goal.