Frequently Asked Questions

If there is a question that isn’t answered here, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team.

Q. Why do you work in Tanzania?

Tanzania is a beautiful country with beautiful people. Tanzanian’s themselves say the thing they love most about their country is how peaceful it is. Tanzania is fortunate that there is no extreme conflict like other countries in sub-Saharan Africa and across the world. Tanzania is trying to improve their country in many ways, including education, infrastructure, job opportunities, water and much more. Made With Hope is just trying to support Tanzania in the direction they are already heading in - to a country where poverty no longer exists.

Q. How did Made With Hope start?

Made With Hope was started by Eleanor Riley after her undergraduate studies in Leeds, UK. Eleanor felt passionate about having more purpose in her life and wanted to make a difference to this often unfair world. Eleanor went to Tanzania in 2013 to find a Tanzanian organisation that was helping children and create a partnership with them so she could support what they were doing. Eleanor was fortunate to find CHETI on her visit and Made With Hope has been collaborating with them ever since. You can read more about Eleanor’s story here.

Q. All countries in Africa are corrupt, right?

Without getting too political, many countries across the world have some culture towards corruption. Made With Hope operate a strict anti-corruption policy. We feel very lucky to have a partner organisation, CHETI, in Tanzania who are extremely trustworthy and transparent. We have never had any issues regarding trust with our partner organisation and the people we deal with in Tanzania. We monitor this regularly and our Trustees are ready to take action if necessary.

Q. How do you keep check on your projects whilst you’re here in the UK?

We try to remain behind the scenes as much as possible and instead empower Tanzanians on the ground. However, we visit our school projects twice a year to fulfil reporting requirements, check on the projects, have meetings with CHETI and generally check we are meeting what we set out to do. Whilst we’re here in the UK, we communicate with CHETI through email, Whatsapp and Skype on an almost daily basis to talk about the projects.

Q. Are you just a bunch of “white western saviours”?

“White western saviours” is a term that is closely linked with international development. One of Made With Hope’s core values is to empower rural Tanzanian communities and the people that live there. We have met so many Tanzanian people who are trying to improve the lives of children in their communities. The barriers they face in improving children’s lives is the lack of opportunities, resources and funding that’s available to them in Tanzania, because the government is poor and unable to support many of its own people. This is where Made With Hope can come in. We can utilise the amazing funding and resources over here in the UK and other “western” countries to support what Tanzanian people ask for to support the next generations. We are a small charity that have a very close relationship with our partner organisation in Tanzania, called CHETI. CHETI is made up of Tanzanians and understand the community needs because they live in some of the communities we work with. We empower CHETI through funding and other resources to help them implement plans to support their own communities. We try to remain behind the scenes as much as possible. However, we do visit our school projects twice a year to fulfil reporting requirements, check on the projects, communicate with CHETI to check everything is okay and generally check we are meeting what we set out to do.

Q. You have some private fee paying schools. Does this mean you’re supporting wealthy children?

Many of students at CHETI schools are extremely poor, who are sponsored or CHETI just allow them to come for free because they cannot bear a child to miss out on a good education. Also, some families contribute small school fees (more than half the price of most private schools). These families are poor, but they have some small income (often because both parents are still alive and within the family household) so there are two incomes coming in. The families will often choose one of their children to go to CHETI school in the hope that they will go onto help bring the family out of poverty. CHETI also have some income generation activities to support the running of this school for disadvantaged children.

Q. How do you pay your operational costs including admin, staff salaries, stationery etc.

When Made With Hope began in 2013, we adopted a 100% donation model, because we were small and completely volunteer led. Our very small operational costs, such as paying our accountant and web hosting and replenishing credit card fees, were funded by a small group of core funders who wanted to support the charity in this way. We were heavily reliant on our founder, who did the majority of the work for Made With Hope in her spare time. However, in early 2019, we had the decision to make whether to continue to operate like this, which would mean the amount of children we help would likely decline as we didn’t have the resources to grow. Or, we could change the way we operate so we could invest in people here in the UK to help us grow the charity, scale up our work and go on to help thousands more children. The board of Trustees felt that investing in fundraising and operational staff was the most effective way of supporting more Tanzanian children. In April 2019, we were lucky to receive one year’s worth of core funding to support hiring a fundraiser and an operational member of staff. Transparency is always a key to us and we want to take you on the journey of how we are going to make this sustainable so that we can continue to employ these members of staff and show you how much impact it is making to Tanzanian children’s lives.

This page will remain a working progress. We will seek to update our FAQ’s with questions that come up to ensure we keep you up to date. As always, please contact us if you have any questions that aren’t here.