Mama Clementina Foundation, the work of Maria Kamm

In Tanzania, a girl who became pregnant was sent away from school. That was policy rather than exception, and it meant her education ended there. Fifteen years old, sixteen, and finished.

Maria Kamm started a school that took them.

That went against the policy and she did it anyway. The Kilimanjaro Academy grew out of it, and the Mama Clementina Foundation around it. More than two thousand seven hundred students have left it since with a diploma or a trade qualification.

Maria Kamm is Ngomi’s mother. So this is not a cause we went looking for, this is where he comes from.

Who Maria Kamm is

Maria Josephine Kasindi Kamm was born in June 1937 in Iringa. She went to school in Tanzania, took a bachelor’s degree in history at Saint Mary’s College in the United States in 1963 and a master’s in education at Syracuse University in 1965, which made her one of the first women from Tanzania with an American university degree. That same year, 1965, she started teaching.

From 1970 to 1992 she was head of Weruweru Secondary School. Her husband, the German doctor Georg Kamm, kept the dispensary there running and taught first aid and health classes. Ngomi grew up on the grounds of that school, among his mother’s lessons and his mother’s pupils.

In 1992 Maria retired, fifty-five years old, and put all of her energy into the foundation. She served a term in parliament on a special seat for the mainland. In 1997 Saint Mary’s College gave her an honorary doctorate in education, in 2014 she was named Tanzanian woman of the year, and in November 2025 the University of Dar es Salaam awarded her an honorary doctorate in letters. Georg died in 2023. Maria is eighty-nine.

Education is the only wealth that cannot be stolen. Use it to build others.  Maria Kamm

Why the foundation came about

The problem was not that there were no schools. The problem was who got put out of them, and who never got in.

Girls drop out of education here sooner than boys, and the reason is almost always money. When a family has to choose which child carries on, that choice rarely falls on the daughter. And if a girl got pregnant on top of that, until recently there was no way back at all.

The Mama Clementina Foundation was set up in 1988 to do something about exactly that. Not by talking about it, but by building a school where those girls could go, and by covering the school fees for the ones who could not raise them.

What the Kilimanjaro Academy is now

The Kilimanjaro Academy stands near Moshi and it is a secondary school for girls. A four-year course, with two more years on top for anybody going on to university. The teaching is in English, across twelve subjects, from mathematics and the sciences through to history.

What makes it different from an ordinary secondary school sits behind the main building. A computer room, a library, laboratories, a sewing workshop and a bakery. Trade qualifications are taken there in tailoring, cooking, hotel work and ICT. A girl who leaves here without a university place leaves with a trade in her hands. That is not a side benefit, that is the whole idea.

The foundation’s schools

The foundation runs more than the school near Moshi.

That last one is no coincidence. Iringa is where she was born, and the school there stands in the village where her own story started.

How the school is paid for

The Kilimanjaro Academy is a school and not a charity project. Students pay school fees, the same as at other secondary schools in Tanzania, and that is what the teaching runs on.

The difference is the girls for whom those fees are out of reach. For them the foundation steps in, and that money has to come from somewhere. Part of it comes from donations. Another part comes from the lodge at the foot of Kilimanjaro that belongs to the foundation, where the takings go to the education, to teaching materials, teachers’ salaries and meals.

That lodge belongs to the foundation and not to us. We do not sell nights there and we earn nothing from it.

That second source is the steady one. A fundraising drive ebbs away as soon as the attention moves to something else. A lodge that is running does not.

Why this sits with us

Plenty of tour operators attach themselves to a good cause. Usually that means a logo at the bottom of a website and an amount per booking, and it could just as easily have been a different cause.

This one is different. We did not choose this work, it was already there before Makasa existed. Ngomi grew up on the grounds at Weruweru, where his mother ran the school for twenty-two years and his father ran the dispensary. Education at home was not a topic of conversation, it was the work.

Education for girls is the dullest and the most effective form of development there is. It produces no photographs that make people flinch, and it works. A girl who finishes school changes the arithmetic of her whole family, and after that the arithmetic of the next one.

Which is why there is no button on this page to press. We are telling you because the work is there, not because we want something from it.

What it adds up to

Most people who come to Tanzania never hear about any of this. They drive past Moshi on their way to the parks and they do not know there is a school there that started with girls who had nowhere else left to go.

More than two thousand seven hundred students have been through it by now. Some went on to university, others left with a trade in their hands. Maria is eighty-nine, and the schools keep running.