What impressed me most during our visit to Tanzania was the warmth of the Tanzanian students and how much we had in common with them. Despite the fact that our cultures are so different and that it felt like we were literally on the other side of the world, we immediately felt comfortable with each other. During the joint workshops we worked on the same issues and problems, laughed about the same things and developed similar ideas for the future.
Student at the Lessing Gymnasium (High School), Frankfurt
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Dialogue between schools in the North and the South
"One Future for all" – this is our motto for the intercultural dialogue between the partner schools and it is one of PROBONO's core motives.
Within the scope of the North-South school partnerships we promote intercultural communication, support study projects, help in the communication between the partner schools and provide support for visits to the partner school. Working together in projects, students from both Germany and Africa learn together and from one another thus promoting intercultural understanding and global learning on both sides.
Our consulting and support of development education work in German schools within the context of North-South school partnerships is funded by the state of Hesse.
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Global learning beyond continental borders
Both students and teachers in the North and the South develop an interest in the foreign culture and way of life. They learn from one another and establish new personal relationships. This promotes an understanding of sustainable development and development policy. Friendships are formed which are valued highly by both students and teachers. The compassion with the people behind the individual stories is a strong motivator to get involved in creating a more socially just world.
The dialogue between the partner schools has many aspects. It begins with the exchange of short "profiles" where the girls and boys from Germany and East Africa introduce themselves and ranges from joint projects for school magazines to German-African theatre and musical performances.
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Digital Project Month 2023: Exchange on the topic of waste and waste management in Germany and Tanzania
All people produce waste. Some more, others less. Nevertheless, the question arises everywhere: How do we deal with it? German and Tanzanian students explored this question together in our digital project month.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) also address the issue of waste. The avoidance of waste on the one hand and the efficient and resource-saving processing of generated waste on the other are a prerequisite for health promotion, climate protection and generally good and dignified living and working conditions. What Germany and Tanzania are doing to achieve the sustainability goals in the area of waste management was the subject of the digital project month.
Read moreFollowing the first digital project week last year, this year we sent around 80 students from two German and two Tanzanian schools on a one-month digital encounter trip - again in cooperation with the PwC Foundation.
One of the centerpieces of the project month was the study trips, during which the students from the north and south met with experts from the waste management, healthcare and politics sectors. They documented their impressions with photos and videos in order to give the students of their partner school visual insights into the realities on site. It became clear how the very different consumer behavior of people in the two countries affects the amount of waste, how strongly the possibilities differ to get rid of the produced waste again and which economic, but also health consequences result from this.
Despite these differences, however, a commonality also emerged, namely that "reduce, reuse, recycle" points the way forward regardless of local circumstances.
In addition to the joint engagement with the project topic, the project month also provided a space for intercultural encounters and the further development of digital skills on both sides. The joint use of the student-centered teaching materials developed by PROBONO and the visit to an extracurricular learning site also opened up new methodological insights at the Tanzanian schools. Thus, the project month made an important contribution to global learning and education for sustainable development - itself a sub-goal of SDG 4.
The implementation of the project week was made possible by the funding and provision of the digital learning space by the PwC Foundation and, above all, by the technical upgrading of the Tanzanian schools with stable Internet as well as laptops, cameras and beamers. These will continue to enable digital encounters in the future as part of the school partnerships. The sustainable impact will also be ensured through further training for the teachers of the Tanzanian schools on the topic of e-learning. Finally, the students' own projects on waste management demonstrated the impact of the project in terms of translating what they learned into everyday life. The digital project month 2023 was therefore a complete success!
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Digital Project Month 2023: Some impressions
The six-minute video shows a few impressions of the topics the young people in Germany and Tanzania discussed, their study excursions, the video conferences and the results of the project month.
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Digital project week: Learning together across thousands of kilometers
How do you notice climate change? What are the global problems and what is the situation like locally? What can we do - together and individually? Pupils from Tanzania and Germany addressed these and similar questions during a digital project week in May 2022: together across thousands of kilometers. After all, digitalization is opening up new avenues for international cooperation in schools as well.
PROBONO is taking advantage of this opportunity and, together with the PwC Foundation, has developed the digital project week on the UN Sustainable Development Goal on climate protection, SDG 13. Even for the participants from Mwanga High School in Tanzania and Humboldtschule Bad Homburg, who have already been linked in a school partnership for many years, this was new territory - with great potential.
Read moreIn the pilot project, around 50 students tackled the issue of the climate crisis and climate protection. The main focus was on the different perspectives of Tanzania and Germany and the causes and consequences of climate change.
An important role was played by the exchange of visual impressions. For example, the students documented a project excursion to an extracurricular learning site with the help of photos and videos, which they then showed to each other. The aim was not only to teach digital skills, but above all to give them the feeling of seeing something of their partner school's country without having to get on a plane - another aspect that fits in with the learning objective of climate protection.
It also created an opportunity to talk about the regional consequences of climate change. Thanks to the cooperation with the PwC Foundation, Mwanga High School in particular was equipped with laptops, a projector and cameras for this purpose. The centerpiece and digital meeting place was the learning platform developed by the PwC Foundation.
The German young people visited the Dottenfelderhof farm in Bad Vilbel, where they not only learned a lot about agriculture's contribution to climate change and its high vulnerability to its consequences, but also helped to muck out the stables. In Tanzania, the students visited the NGO TanzMont, where they looked at the impact of humans on the ecosystem on Mount Kilimanjaro.
During the project week, support was provided by climate experts, including TanzMont. The organization was founded with the aim of raising the environmental awareness of the population in the Kilimanjaro region. During a panel discussion with the young people, climate expert Dr. Sixbert Mwanga, Executive Director of the Climate Action Network Tanzania and co-author of the IPCC, and biologist Dr. Maiken Winter from the association WissenLeben e.V. were also digitally connected.
The summary: Despite some technical challenges on both sides, it became clear that such a form of exchange is suitable for learning together across continents.
Therefore, we look forward to further developing the idea of collaboration in the digital space and thus strengthening school partnerships in the PROBONO network.