About the Foundation
African Reflections Foundation did not begin with a strategy document. It began at a broken well, with one woman who agreed to try something.
Part one · 1985 – 2016
Taken from The Village Heart, the Foundation’s own 2016 publication. Every entry cites the page it comes from. Where the book records no year, this page says so rather than guessing.
Part two · 2016 – today
Taken from project records and partner reports, dated throughout. Nothing from the book appears here, and work not yet delivered carries its real status.
From the Foundation’s own 2016 publication, in the order the book tells it.
1985
The Village Heart · p66
Maryvonne Pool came to Tanzania for the first time in 1985. She travelled out to remote villages and was struck by the conditions she found there, and above all by the water people were drinking.
She has written that this was the moment she understood she could have a much greater impact than she had imagined — and the point at which her humanitarian work began.
A drought
year not recorded in the book
The Village Heart · p14–21
During a drought in the Mkuranga District, Maryvonne was travelling with her driver, Juma, when she stopped at the sight of a woman drawing water from an old broken well. The woman was Maua.
Maua lived two kilometres away. The broken well was her only source of water. She was married with four children, farming on a small scale both to feed her family and to earn what income she could.
Maryvonne asked whether she would be willing to grow more crops if she were helped to do it, working alongside a team of women from the village. Maua agreed.
The founding
the book does not date this moment
The Village Heart · p14
The book is direct about what happened next: the idea of an NGO began to form, and that was the beginning of African Reflections Foundation.
What started as an offer of help to one woman became a method — work through the women already leading their communities, begin with water, and let the village own what gets built.
The first wells
The Village Heart · p31
The Foundation began with hand-dug wells of roughly sixty feet. At the time there were neither the donors nor the technical knowledge for anything deeper.
After five years that approach stopped working. The hand-dug wells were drying up as the climate changed, and the Foundation moved to deep wells — drilled, surveyed, and powered by solar pumps.
The women’s groups
The Village Heart · p56–64
In Kisele, Hadija was rising at five in the morning to prepare doughnuts to pay her children’s school fees. Maryvonne brought the village women together to talk about a well and an agricultural project.
Hadija went on to lead two women’s groups — Matokayo, meaning “results”, with twenty-two women, and Jipemoyo, meaning “take courage”, with eighteen. Permission was obtained from local landowners so the groups could grow crops that benefited the women directly.
In Njiapanda, Mama Mbonde asked the Foundation for public sanitary toilets, encouraged the village women to breed organic chickens, and opened a common bank account so they could save together.
The schools
The Village Heart · p52–55
A newspaper report about a school in poor condition at Mkokozi led Maryvonne to contact the journalist and go and see it. The school was built of mud and sticks, with five students to a desk.
At the school assembly a small hand took hers. That was Monica. The Foundation drilled a well at her school, which serves her and six hundred other students.
2016
The Village Heart · p1–157
The Foundation published The Village Heart — a 157-page record of the villages, the wells, and the women who led the work, photographed and designed by Samuel Mwanga and written by Maryvonne Pool.
The archive on this website is drawn from that book. It is where this account of the Foundation’s beginnings comes from, and it is the reason the earliest years can be told at all.
From The Village Heart archive · 2016 · pages 14–66. Photography: Samuel Mwanga / Maryvonne Pool.
The book stops in 2016, but the drilling did not. The sponsored well register runs from 2009 to 2026 without a gap — every year in that span has at least one sponsored site on record, in schools, dispensaries and villages across the region.
It is the plainest evidence of continuity the Foundation has: not a claim about what changed, simply a list of where water arrived and when.
43
sponsored sites on record, 2009–2026
Almost all of them sponsored by Drilling for HOPE. This is a sponsored subset of the Foundation’s water work, not its total — the register says so on its own page too.
Open the registerDated from project records and partner reports. Where a report makes a claim this site cannot yet verify, the claim is attributed to the report and dated rather than adopted.
2016
Source: ARF Impact Report
The same year the book was published, the Foundation started an organic farm at Kisele in Mkuranga — working with Matokeo, twenty-two women, and Jipemoyo, eighteen. These are the groups Hadija had led a decade earlier, and they are the direct link between the archive above and everything below it.
Growing produce turned out to be the easier half. Reaching a market that paid fairly was harder, and it is the problem the following years were spent on.
29 September 2021
Completed· 2021Source: Projects IMPACT Report — ARF × Build a Life Foundation
A primary school built at Kinene with the Build a Life Foundation: six classrooms, administrative offices, washrooms, furniture, accommodation for teachers, and a solar-powered well drilled by Drilling for HOPE.
It set the pattern for everything after it — a building and its water supply delivered together, and both named partners credited on the record rather than absorbed into the Foundation’s own account.
25 June 2023
Completed· 2023Source: Girls’ Hostel Impact Report
A hostel for eighty girls at Mwarusembe Secondary School — the same village where the Foundation began. Laundry, modern and accessible toilets, bathrooms, beds and mattresses, electricity, and a solar-powered well.
The point of a hostel is the walk it removes. Girls who had been travelling long distances each day, in the dark at either end, now live at the school during term.
13 November 2023
Source: ARF Impact Report
A retail space in central Dar es Salaam, opened with TanzPro Greens Ltd, selling produce from the farming groups and giving them a route to a market that pays fairly.
TanzPro Greens is a separate company, not part of the Foundation. This site keeps the two apart wherever they appear together, because a company’s sales are not an NGO’s results.
17 September 2024
Completed· 2024Source: Girls’ Hostel Impact Report
Eighty more places, at Kiparang’anda Secondary School. The opening had been planned for 10 August and happened on 17 September — the record carries the date it actually opened, not the date it was meant to.
A month later, deep wells were completed at Mkuranga Primary and Kiparang’anda Secondary.
2025
Completed· 2025Source: Girls’ Hostel Impact Report
Eighty places in Dondo Ward. The Foundation’s report describes it as the only school hostel in the ward — a claim this site attributes to the report and dates, rather than stating as a standing fact.
These are under way or awaiting funding. They are listed here with their real status so that a plan is never read as an accomplishment — which is the single most common way a story like this one goes wrong.
It stops at the edge of the records. Several figures the Foundation has published about itself — how many people it has reached, how many wells it has built in total — are still being reconciled, and they are not used here to round the story off. The people on the team today are not listed either, because that list has not been confirmed.
A history that ends on an honest edge is worth more than one that ends on a number nobody can stand behind.