Most people live with serious mental health problems without their knowledge, and as such with time their situations become severe, leading to extremes such as self-harm and suicide. While globally the African continent has among the least numbers of cases, it does not make it a less serious issue. This is because human life is involved.

We must agree that people are built and groomed differently and as such have varying capacities inasmuch as handling of pressure and stressful situations is concerned. What can be a non-issue to one can be a big problem to another, leading them to anxiety, losing a sense of value of their own lives or even feeling hopeless about themselves.

Speaking of use of single-use plastics, we need policies that strictly forbid entry of unnecessary plastics, especially in packagings.

We need to more and more invest in biodegradable packaging, especially for consumables like foods and drinks. About 40 per cent of plastic waste has a connection with food and drinks.

Early childhood shapes the foundation for emotional, cognitive, and social growth, yet many Tanzanian children grow up without active fathers, especially in low-income and single-parent households. Studies reveal that over half of Tanzanian children experience developmental delays, while 80 percent of single parents are mothers. Experts stress that fatherhood is irreplaceable in shaping confidence, identity, and moral values. Promoting gender equality and child well-being, therefore, requires redefining fatherhood and strengthening men’s engagement in parenting from the earliest years.

With the widespread use of computer mediated communication devices and these emojis, it is worth exploring how much, or rather in what ways, our emotional communication is influenced by emojis. Most emotion related emojis and emoticons (emotional icons) communicate these emotions only in a general sense and cannot really touch the unexplored territories of dynamic human emotions and feelings.

My African heritage plays a crucial role in my storytelling. My Swahili culture and language largely constitutes my identity as a storyteller. ven though my children are half Czech, and half Tanzanian, they are blended in both cultures in a beautiful way. I believed by them having Swahili language and cultural awareness they will appreciate more the half of who they are, and be happy and free, when they visit Tanzania.

Children can be encouraged to learn foreign languages even without being told their mother languages are not good enough. This way they will keep their love towards their mother languages and will not feel shameful to use them.

While traditional visual artists have so much value in the work done, the social media art appreciation is being taken over by the AI artists who invest nothing in their designs, and have no emotional connection with such art works. Traditional visual artists deserve more admiration and support than the AI artists who are not personally involved in the production of the artworks.

This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper, Tanzania on February 11, 2025 Shimbo Pastory It is common today to…

As artificial intelligence can aggregate knowledge so well, it is a free opportunity for young people to test the waters in the fields of their aspiration, which they either did not have a chance to explore at all, or did not learn so well in school. AI allows a fair share of this knowledge for free, guaranteeing a transformation of digital literacy and general knowledge of the people after a while, if consistently used and engaged in actual life.

It is time our education system incorporates some wonderful technological tools that foster student – teacher learning engagement in exciting ways. But this will be really hard to reach if our system remains rigidly tied to heavily demanding curricula and grades as markers of successful teaching and learning. Education is beyond grades!