The Girls Foundation of Tanzania (TGFT) is a community-driven nonprofit which provides access to quality education for high-achieving girls and young women living in extreme poverty. In 2025, they are educating 100 students in needs-and-merit-based sponsorship and scholarship programs. They partner with each student to provide leadership and life skills essential for her success, creating a tight-knit community of like-minded girls and mentors.

Simply being in school is not enough. Girls need mentors, essential life skills, a social support system, a community of marginalized and ambitious girls, and a place to belong. The Girls Center provides a safe, welcoming place for girls to live, study and access mentorship, psychological support, and opportunities beyond the Tanzanian classroom. Students participate in workshops on sexual health and rights, climate change and entrepreneurship, learning skills in self-defense, first aid, public speaking and writing.

In 2022, the Board of Directors of TGFT engaged Scattergood Design to help create the first permanent home for TGFT in Arusha, Tanzania. Using the concepts we developed for a six-building campus, the NGO purchased four acres of a former coffee plantation on the outskirts of Arusha.  After visiting in February of 2023, we adapted the prototype buildings, playfields, plantings and circulation to reflect actual context and conditions.

Most girls live in modest homes in rural villages, and attend secondary schools with barracks-like, 100-bed dormitories. To create an environment that feels like home, the Girls House is composed of four buildings—administration, living and two wings with four rooms housing up to 8 girls—linked by a covered courtyard. The living, dining and kitchen spaces are interconnected under a single roof, since girls help with meals and housework. The courtyard allows expanded dining and gathering, so the House feels comfortable with just a dozen girls interning during the six-month gap between Secondary and High School or all girls “at home” for school holidays.  A curved lattice wall of hand-made local brick provides privacy while promoting ventilation between the buildings.

TGFT partners with other non-profits to mentor girls and boys in nearby schools, and TGFT students ‘pass it forward’ by volunteering, teaching, and interning in the surrounding community. In the last six years, their Community Outreach Program has impacted over 64,000 people. The Community Library welcomes visitors just inside the main gate, with TGFT staff and offices visible from the entry. TGFT conducts an AfterSchool Program for students in grades 1-7 at Library: none of these students own textbooks.

The library is joined to the classroom and sewing room by a covered courtyard for outdoor reading and programming. The shed roof of the Askari House announces the main entrance and parking on the north, with Public Latrines nearby to serve programs at the Library and playfields.  These service buildings are natural cement block with struck joints, merging visually with the perimeter site wall.

The Girls’ House and Executive Director and Volunteer Houses are located at the south end of the site among existing trees and shrubs to preserve privacy. Portions of the buildings are oriented to the northeast to capture views of Mount Meru, the fourth highest peak in Africa, just 30 miles away. The irregular placement also provides privacy between houses and screens the service yard for laundry, composting and chicken houses in the southwest corner of the site.

The one-story buildings share a vocabulary of gabled and hipped roofs, with similar windows, doors and wall articulation.  Shed roofs and simple light monitors project from roof ridges to bring natural light into deeper spaces while exhausting hot air. Their upward visual movement  echoes the slopes of Mount Meru as well as the mission of TGFT. Designs incorporate many details developed over a twelve-year collaboration with the masons, carpenters, project engineer and founder of Africa Schoolhouse, an American NGO which funds public school buildings at the south end of Lake Victoria. Since the design team could only make two site visits during construction, the Askari House and later finish mockups served as prototypes, supplemented by weekly conference calls, photos and sketches

The construction team traveled 300 miles from home to live in the neighborhood for the 18-month project. They trained 200 local workers and hosted two women architecture students from Ardhi University, one of only four design programs in the country, for summer internships.  All construction work was executed by hand.  The only machinery on site was a 100-liter concrete mixer and three-wheeled “bajaji” to transport block and other materials, with a grader brought in to level the playing field. A shipping container which served as the construction office was re-located and re-purposed for storage at jobs’ end.

Construction materials were simple, common and locally-manufactured, with the exception of aluminum roofing, corrugated fiberglass for clerestories and gypsum board for ceilings. Porch railings, posts supporting courtyard roofs and screens at light monitors are made of rapidly-renewable, natural eucalyptus gumpoles. Larger clerestories are screened with custom-made cement “wave blocks.” The site wall incorporates off-sets to minimize the need for reinforcing at piers. Interior finishes are modest and durable, with polished concrete floors throughout and cast concrete counters for kitchens and the girls’ bathrooms. Wood doors and steel gates were built on site, and custom wood furnishings provided by a local craftsman.

Careful siting of the structures preserved more than three dozen mature trees, legacies of the coffee plantation.  The natural topography was enhanced with drainage swales to retain run-off during severe rainstorms, coordinated through a grant from the Earth Allies Restoration Network. During the 8-day training, 90 TGFT students, alumnae and staff planted 450 indigenous fruit and shade trees and established vegetable gardens that fill areas of the site not occupied by buildings or playfields.

Although municipal water and electricity are available, both are unreliable, so the site can serve as a demonstration for sustainability measures available to homeowners in the rapidly-developing suburbs of Arusha. A borehole (well) connected to raised water storage tanks which supplement municipal water.  At the Girls House, gutters and downspouts fill an underground cistern to water plantings.  All other buildings have roof drainage systems that can connect to rain barrels. 

Arusha is located 3 degrees south of the Equator at an elevation of 4600 feet. Temperatures range from 56 degrees F to 83 degrees F. Without heating or air conditioning, deep roof overhangs and porches shade windows and masonry walls and large windows and doors provide ventilation. Hot water for bathing is provided by solar hot water heaters and, with two separate systems in the bedroom wings, girls can be encouraged to compete for water conservation.

Project Team:

Design Architect:        Scattergood Design

Architect of Record:    JT Architects

Structural Engineer:    Estate Care Ltd.

Services Engineer:       AGRENEb Consult Ltd.

Civil Engineer:             Haley & Aldrich

Contractor:                 Africa Schoolhouse

Contractor of Record: Maracha Centre Contractors & Supplies Ltd.