DEVELOPMENT AID WORLD NETWORK

My wife and I established Development Aid World Network (D.A.W.N), a nonprofit supporting charitable efforts around the world. Our current focus is helping the children at the Mto wa Mbu Orphanage in Tanzania.  Our emphasis is on improving the orphanage’s infrastructure along with the children’s quality of life and education.  We are committed to being directly involved with the planning and implementation stages in addition to providing monetary assistance. We hope that our efforts will have a long lasting, positive impact on these children’s environment and lives forever.

After a visit to the Mto wa Mbu Orphanage in Tanzania we decided to provide this facility with desperately needed infrastructure advancements. As a builder and project manager, I recognized that my abilities could help these children improve their standard of living.  

The children currently lack many daily necessities.  Our nonprofit, Development Aid World Network is working closely with the orphanage and have prioritized a "wishlist" for the 33 children and staff that live at the facility. Our top priority is drilling a water well.  It is hard to fathom how much we take fresh water for granted in the United States. With their own water supply they will not only have safe drinking water but will be able to irrigate gardens, trade water for food and improve daily hygiene.

After we accomplish drilling the water well, we want to supply the facility with grid power, kitchen appliances, a greenhouse, computers and a remote learning connection.  This facility has been operating under poor conditions, lacking some basic infrastructure for 10 years and we think we can help them achieve these goals.

2022 Update

Looking forward to 2022 we can only hope the tourism returns to Tanzania so that the normal donations return to the orphanage. As for our part, DAWN will continue to support the children as best we can. My wife and I hope to return to the orphanage within the next three years.

2021 Update

The orphanage manager has big plans for the future of the facility. They are hopeful to add three buildings. One more sleeping quarter for more children, one fully devoted building for school purposes only and one building devoted to staff quarters. As with everyone's plans the last two years, Covid-19 has devastated the tourist travel to Tanzania and the daily visitors have all but ceased coming to visit the children as we did 5 years ago. The lack of tourism has really hurt the donations the facility managers were accustomed to seeing. So for 2021 our focus has been on helping to support secondary education fees for some of the children as they leave the orphanage and also to make sure the staff are receiving some sort of compensation for all of their efforts.

2020 Update

We were excited to hear that another charitable family from the UK took it upon themselves to donate many computers to the orphanage. We were very surprised to learn that in Tanzania their internet costs are not paid for as we are used to. In Tanzania most people do rent, but if you have the ability to purchase your own modem, the internet is basically free as long as the modem works. If I understand correctly there are some service charges and fees that are incurred, but the cost is minimal. So we are excited to announce we have supplied the orphanage with a really nice modem and now the children and staff have established a full computer room.

2019 Update

2019 was a big year for the orphanage. Our entire family came together and we were able to fund the installation of permanent power for the whole complex. It was a lucky circumstance really that the community was running a new infrastructure line about a half mile away from the complex and our timing was just right so we could piggy back on the work and have them bring the power directly to all the buildings. Our 2018 water well project was a success, but after many months of testing the water was not potable so the project had to be followed up on by installing a very complex reverse osmosis system. We are happy to report that people from around the community now trade goods to the orphanage in exchange for their very clean jugs of water.

2018 Update

We have accomplished our goal of installing a working water well and provided grid power to the facility and backup solar lighting. Before Christmas the facility and children will receive a hot water heater and refrigerator. We are working on setting up the Internet for their classroom and in parallel accepting used laptop donations. We partnered with a local Denver non-profit that cleans, removes all data, installs educational software and will ship these computers via DHL.

Thank you everyone who has helped us in our efforts and let's continue to make a lasting difference together!