Kazijya Kila
At the age of 18, Kazijya Kila dropped out of secondary school in Donge Mnyimbe, Zanzibar, due to her pregnancy. She got married and also had her first born son, but life was tough for her as a new mother with no job or any other source of income. “I was newly married, with a baby and I was just a housewife. The first three years of my marriage were the hardest. I would wake up at night and hear my baby crying and most times, it was because he hadn’t had enough to eat. That used to break my heart.” Kazijya recalls. “I felt like all the odds were against my new family”, she adds. In 2013, Kazijya enrolled with the Tanzania Productive Social Safety Nets Projects' Conditional Cash Transfers, supported by the SDG Fund, and received her first instalment of 20,000 shillings (10 dollars). “This cash support has been a blessing. My life has never been the same again” she says. Thanks to those transfers, Kazijya was able to start her own business. Her story is one of the 1.1 million vulnerable households living below the food poverty line in mainland Tanzania that have had their lives changed thanks to the Tanzania PSSN Project and assisted in the introduction of Conditional Cash Transfers programs.