Sega Girls School Celebrates 5-Year Anniversary!

Celebrating Five Years: How Time Flies!

This fall the Sega Girls School is celebrating it’s 5-Year Anniversary – a huge milestone considering that five years ago the school was simply a dream. The progress that has been made, the obstacles that have been overcome, and the lives that have been changed during the school’s creation certainly provide significant reasons to celebrate!

Here are some fun flashbacks to see just how far the school has come:

• 2006 The Very Beginning – Polly Dolan, SEGA’s Founder and Director, observed the severe need for accessible education for girls while working for CARE in Tanzania. Determined to make a difference, Polly began brainstorming a way to build an accessible, safe school for underprivileged girls so that they could continue their education beyond 6th grade.

• 2007 Pieces Begin to Fall into Place – Polly met Helen Nkalang’ango, the founder of a Primary School in Morogoro, and between the two of them they secured a piece of land in a valley of the beautiful Uluguru Mountains and officially founded the Sega Girls School….! However, they were still missing some major pieces  of the puzzle – namely students, school buildings and money to finance the school’s formation.

The Uluguru Mountains provide a beautiful backdrop for SEGA's campus 

• Nurturing Minds Makes the Scene – Polly and her sister, Tracey Dolan, founded Nurturing Minds in order to help raise funds to support the Sega Girls School’s creation.
• The First Students – The Sega Girls School’s pioneer classes began with 30 brave girls who finished the equivalent of Grade 8 in September 2009 and took up residence in 2010. After significant donations – the Sega Girls School was up and running!

Polly with SEGA's pioneer class

• Behind-the-Scene Obstacles – Amongst all this excitement were continuous challenges; tricky government registrations, unreliable staff and questionable engineering. Imagine, for example, a foundation that varied by 3 feet from one side of a room to the other!
• Happening Right Now! –  Thanks to many people’s perseverance, generosity and dedication, the Sega Girls School has come an incredibly long way in a very short amount of time. The Sega campus now hosts 10 buildings, 150 girls, an organic garden and a chicken operation with 3700 birds! Through these tools the Sega Girls School educates and teaches girls the tools they need to become entrepreneurs. One student who has dreams of being an engineer said, “Sega changed my life a lot, from the day I started.  It gave me a path to reach my goal, and I try very hard to reach my goal”.

• Future Aspirations – Dolan hopes to see the Sega Girls School become as financially self-sufficient as possible and consistently show high academic performance. No doubt these goals will see challenges of their own, but knowing the energy and dedication so many people show for the school, there is little doubt in anyone’s mind that we will continue to have many successes to celebrate!

Happy 5-Year Anniversary SEGA and huge thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way – we could not have done it without you!