Children aren't left alone any more - Fransisca, Tnzania

“My name is Fransisca, I am 16 years old, studying in form 2 at Lumemo Secondary School in Tanzania. I live with my parents who are farmers.

In our village, during the farming season, our parents leave home and go away more than 35 kms to look for work. This makes them stay away from home for the whole season, sometimes until harvest. They could go for more than 4 months without coming home.

During this whole period, some children are left alone at home with little food and other basic needs. When the food left is finished, children have to find means of getting more food or money and sometimes enough to support their siblings who were left with them.

If it is a boy, he could go look for work in the streets (child labour), and for girls, they sometimes engage in sex to support themselves. Some girls get pregnant, and some are married and stop coming to school.

Plan has benefited people in our area and brought a new dawn to the children. Plan has been using different approaches to train teachers, parents and community members on child rights.

Through seminars, child rights awareness has improved in our area because most of the community members, who left their children at home during farming, have now stopped, and more children continue with schooling.

In the future I would like to become a teacher in my village. I want to be able to pass knowledge to the children in my community and make them better people for our nation.”