About the School
(Written by school founder and principal, Jacob Mtasha)
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The Brainy Heroes Secondary School is a private secondary school located in the Arusha region of Tanzania East Africa. It was founded by myself, Jacob Paul Matasha, Kwaeslema Lazaro Ng’aida, and Yaledi Elisha Kuta in 2016. It is a boarding school to enable students to study well and reduce the incidence of child labour (work that deprives children of their childhood, their dignity and their potential), and the influences of peer group pressure - there are a large number of school dropouts in our country.
 
Also, equality of education is vital to our country’s development. I have 3 daughters of my own, and this is something that we hope to work towards in the future – to build another campus for a girls school.
In order to start the school, we shared our capital to rent a premises, however the buildings were old and required major repairs to meet Education Department requirements. In 2016 we started our school with 14 students - we now have 11 teaching staff, five non-teaching staff and 220 students.
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The student numbers have been increasing year after year due to our good academic performances and the positive behaviour of our boys. We have built trust and confidence in the community, and the government as well. So there has been an unusual increase in numbers of students – but we are struggling to provide all the amenities we need. We have no single room that is large enough to seat every student and our dormitories are overflowing. Also, our costs have been running high time after time due to increasing rental costs, and sometimes we are unable to pay our staff.
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Due to these challenges, we decided to start saving little by little, plus take the money from our pension funds, and managed to buy a block of land. However we have failed to build a school because of financial difficulties.
In 2022 we met Joanne Stringfield who came to Tanzania as a volunteer. She and her husband Colin are now friends of Brainy Heroes Secondary School and sponsor a number of the children. Joanne has been visiting our school twice a year, and has been so kind and helpful in many things including starting a library, providing staff computers, student calculators, an overhead projector, microscopes and text books. Students and teachers are now enjoying and accessing the library and these other gifts to expand their knowledge, and greatly enjoy the opportunity to read books.
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During her last visit, Joanne offered to support our dream of building a school by committing herself to look for donors who could support our vision. This will greatly reduce our running costs, and we will be able to access more needy communities, and provide quality education to larger numbers. As founders we are extremely grateful for their support, and to future donors to our cause. We welcome you all to help enable our dream to come true!
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Many thanks,
Mr. Jacob
(+255 786 559 355)
