About UTSS

Our amazing Tanzanian team makes up 2 well-staffed departments to help achieve its goals. The departments are:

1. Education Scholarship Fund (ESF) is the UTSS flagship, offering education grants to keen and dedicated students with albinism demonstrating a need for financial or other schooling assistance. Beneficiaries are grantees for primary, secondary and all levels of higher learning up to PhD levels. Due to the multiple attacks on PWA in Tanzania, hundreds of children were herded into 9 Government boarding schools throughout the country for “safe keeping”. The extreme overcrowding and poor living conditions in these schools compelled UTSS to relocate hundreds of these “displaced children” into higher quality private boarding schools. The ESF program also covers the costs of the medical services for sick grantees and ensures that they get protective gear including sunscreen lotion and low vision devices. These students will be future models within their own society of what PWA can be when given equal opportunity. This is our greatest “weapon” against discrimination and our most powerful source of educating and advocating a culture towards change.
2. Advocacy and Public Awareness (APA) deals with public education on albinism, disseminating information on health and offering truths about albinism to diffuse existing myths that often lead to discrimination and stigma used by witchdoctors and their clients to justify the macabre killings of PWA. APA uses media to educate and advocate both nationally and internationally. It informs and educates the public on human rights violations by investigating, collecting and publishing data about the atrocities against PWA. There is also a strong emphasis on the domestic understanding of albinism with simple, de-mythologizing messages about human dignity and respect. We also focus on simple genetic / medical explanations along with easy ways to live with and care for the condition.