Maanda Ngoitiko

I am the founder and Executive Director of Pastoral Women's Council (PWC). PWC is a women-led and focused organization that finds ways to support, mobilize, and enable pastoral women and girls to achieve better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. We seek out pastoral women and girls in the most remote areas of northern Tanzania who lack access to essential services and help them to become self-reliant and take control of their own development. Our passionate membership base of over 6,000 pastoralist women, and our membership driven approach, means we listen and respond to the members we serve. PWC addresses the root causes and effects of poverty, exclusion, intersectional marginalization and injustice by empowering women to engage in the development of their communities as equals. It is a rights-based approach, meaning that women and girls know their rights and are able to claim their rights where necessary. We understand the complexities and intersectionality of pastoral women and girls’ marginalization and therefore aim to offer a holistic range of solutions that have proved successful in transforming established gender relations in remote pastoralist areas.

PWC serves Ngorongoro, Longido, and Monduli Districts in Arusha Region, northern Tanzania. Together the districts cover 28,337 square kilometers with a population of over 450,000 people living in 180 villages. The majority of these villages are located in remote, rural areas where most women and girls lack basic services and organizations that they can turn to for help. In the next five years, PWC will work to increase our range of programing and interventions in these three districts in order to reach more women and girls and ensure that those communities have the intensive, holistic support they need. In practice, we are aiming to ensure that quality education, economic, water, health and rights needs are all met in our working areas so that there is lasting societal transformation and sustainable development.

PWC work is organized in six thematic areas namely:
Goal 1: To Enhance the Ability of Pastoralist Women to Claim their Rights
Goal 2: To Economically Empower Pastoralist Women
Goal 3: To Improve Access to Quality and Inclusive Education
Goal 4: To Improve Women’s Health through Facilitating Access to Essential Reproductive Health Services and Improved Hygiene and Sanitation
Goal 5: To Facilitate Access to Clean water
Goal 6: To Build Pastoral Communities Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Change

Joined 2021

Organisation