When a crisis touches our hearts, our natural instinct is to help. For churches and faith communities, this desire often leads to food drives, clothing collections, or donations to emergency relief efforts — all valuable responses in times of urgent need.
But what happens when that need isn’t short-term?
What happens when a refugee camp isn’t a stopgap, but a home for decades?
At Equipping Hope International, one of our foundational commitments is simple: we hire local. That means when we need someone to teach English or train tailoring students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp, we look first — and often only — to the refugee community itself.
We don’t fly in short-term instructors from the U.S. or recruit professionals from overseas. Instead, we invest in the talents, skills, and leadership already present within the camp.
Here’s why that decision isn’t just practical — it’s essential to who we are and how we believe real transformation happens.
When we first started Equipping Hope International in 2018, we didn’t begin with a long strategic plan or big donor campaign. We began with a friendship, a shared burden, and a simple desire to do something that mattered. Five years later, our work in the Nyarugusu refugee camp has grown into a small but deeply rooted effort to equip refugees with skills, opportunity, and spiritual hope.
Serving in Nyarugusu, one of the largest and longest-standing refugee camps in Africa, has taught us more than we ever expected. And as a Christian nonprofit working in Tanzania, we’ve had to unlearn some assumptions, deepen our commitments, and trust God to multiply however much we bring.
Whether you’ve been walking with us since the beginning or are just now learning about our mission, we want to share five of the most important lessons we’ve learned since launching educational and vocational programs in a refugee camp setting.
In most organizations, success is measured in numbers like revenue, expansion, metrics that make for bold headlines and bright graphs. But in a refugee camp, where nearly everything is constrained by circumstance, success looks different.
At Equipping Hope International, we’ve spent the past several years walking alongside refugees in the Nyarugusu camp in western Tanzania. We’ve seen firsthand how long-term displacement challenges conventional ideas of progress. And we’ve learned to ask a different question: What does faithfulness look like here?
At Equipping Hope International, we often say: we are not just building programs — we are building people.
We believe that transformation comes through more than skills training or language lessons. It comes through the power of the Gospel, through the presence of Christ, and through the faithful prayers of His people.
If you’re wondering how to support the work we’re doing in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in western Tanzania, start here: pray.
In part one of our 2022 program reflection, we shared the growth and outcomes of our English education initiative in the Nyarugusu refugee camp. Today, we turn our attention to another pillar of Equipping Hope International’s work, vocational training for women through the Business of Hope tailoring program.
Since 2019, this initiative has equipped dozens of refugee women, many of them widows, adolescent girls, and orphans, with practical sewing skills and the confidence to pursue income-generating activities in a camp where few economic opportunities exist. This program is about more than skills. It is about dignity, security, and future stability.
In the earliest days of Equipping Hope International, before we had formed a board, launched a program, or drafted a mission statement, I kept returning to a simple but powerful idea, the kind of idea that’s easy to say but hard to live: teach a man to fish.
In refugee camps like Nyarugusu, the conversation around skills is often framed in terms of survival. Learning to sew means income. Learning English means opportunity. Agricultural training means food security.
All of these are true. But at Equipping Hope International, we believe there’s more to it.
We believe work has spiritual meaning.
When we set out our goals for 2020, a global pandemic wasn’t on the list. Like so many others around the world, we’ve had to adjust, pivot, and pray our way through every change COVID-19 has brought. In the Nyarugusu refugee camp, where our work is located, the effects of COVID may be particularly difficult to navigate. The camp is densely populated. Healthcare resources are limited.
But amid all the challenges, one thing has remained unchanged: our commitment to equipping hope. And through that commitment, a new opportunity emerged — one that combined our existing programs, responded to the global pandemic in a proactive manner, and empowered our graduates to serve their community in a tangible way.
We call it Protecting Hope.
