This summer, I spent five weeks as a program intern at ICCAO (Integrating Capacity and Community Advancement Organization) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. ICCAO is a youth-led, youth-serving organization that works to increase youth participation in civic and development activities to help Tanzania seize its demographic dividend. Funded by the Malala Fund, the Government of Tanzania, and Oxfam International, its programs empower at-risk youth across Tanzania through vocational training, education, civic advocacy, and women’s empowerment. In my role at ICCAO, I designed and led workshops for secondary school drop-outs to build life skills and awareness about substance abuse, prepared a presentation on youth health issues that was presented to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Parliament of Tanzania, conducted a strategic analysis to update ICCAO’s five-year Country Strategic Plan (CSP), and wrote and edited grant applications for new projects. 

Through my Leadership in Action project, I learned that being a leader requires asking people what they want instead of telling them what they need. In the field of international development, there is too often an ethos that the right answers to economic development reside in the West. After all, these development economists argue, the United States is the richest country on Earth. However, what works in one country, cultural context, and time period may not work in another. Most crucially, Tanzanians do not strive to be the United States — they simply want to be a healthier and more prosperous version of Tanzania. 

At ICCAO, I worked on a program that supports girls’ education in rural Tanzania through providing female students with school supplies and mentorship. However, ICCAO noticed a problem: some girls were still unable to go to school because the school was so far from their homes that the walk to school consumed too much of their day. ICCAO’s leadership thought the solution to this problem was to build a dormitory so some girls could “board” at school, allowing them to stay in class. However, this project was funded by a large INGO and that INGO declared that it does not fund dormitories, only school supplies. In this way, the hubris of a large western-based INGO ensured that money continued to be channeled to buy school supplies for students that could not attend school in the first place. 

This cycle of ignorance and ineffectiveness can be broken when development organizations listen to their local partners — asking local communities what they need and working with them to provide it. For example, one of ICCAO’s initiatives is a livelihood training program for young out-of-school mothers with bi-weekly meetings. While I was at ICCAO, the number of women showing up to the sessions was rapidly depleting, from over twenty to just a couple by the third session. We asked the women why they were not coming and they told us they could not afford the transportation costs to come to the ICCAO office. However, ICCAO’s funders required that they not directly provide money to people but rather empower them to improve their own financial situation. Meanwhile, these people could not reach the office in the first place without such initial cash. To remedy this gap, we decided to give the women not money but jewelry, encouraging them to sell it during the week to raise money for transportation. The next week, the number of young mothers who came doubled. They asked for more jewelry, and we helped them grow their own new small jewelry businesses. In this sense, by listening and working with a local community, ICCAO was able to empower them to be financially independent. This example reinforces the importance of thinking outside the box, rejecting traditionally western development orthodoxy and instead co-creating programming directly with community members to allow their lived experiences to inform culturally sensitive and locally relevant development work. 

My experience at ICCAO taught me that the international development system is broken. An innovative and locally-led grassroots organization like ICCAO has to rely on project-based international grants to do their work, meaning that the organization must shift their priorities and programs to meet the demands of western funders who lack the same understanding of the local context. Meanwhile, most aid money stays within a small group of very large organizations based in the west, which spend large portions of program money on well-paid salaries to senior executives and consultants in the Global North. Breaking this system requires localization, allowing development to be driven by organizations led by those in the communities they seek to empower. In doing so, local partners must be trusted to lead programs of their own design that are responsive to the needs of a specific community, informed by their feedback. Orthodoxy can only lead so far. What Tanzania needs is not more programs from the United States, but more programs by and for Tanzanians. ICCAO, in its youth-led, youth-serving approach, is doing just that. It is a lesson to me that leadership requires listening to and empowering local communities, rather than speaking for them.