5 Things We Learned Teaching Entrepreneurship in Tanzania

A group of Tanzanian students pose for a photo with their certificates

My brother, Tadeo Acosta-Rubio MSEL’24, and I spent 10 days in Tanzania with a Babson cohort of students and faculty members, teaching entrepreneurship to middle and high school students at local schools.

We also enjoyed a couple of safaris. What struck me the most about being on safari is how harmonious it felt. There were moments when you are looking at six different species all in a 20-foot radius. Zebras, giraffes, bulls, monkeys, wild hogs, and gazelles all just co-existing. The harmony was precisely what we felt on the entire trip.

A view of elephants crossing, from the inside of a vehicle

This experience was part of Babson’s Youth Entrepreneurship Program offered through The Institute for Social Innovation. The annual volunteer trip to Tanzania—led by Lisa Hellmuth Thomas P’18 ’21 ’25, the institute’s director of social impact and sustainability—included 20 students working with 250 youth and teachers over two sessions during the winter break. Many of the Babson students’ participation was funded by the new Social Innovation Fund, which was made possible by Babson Trustee KP Balaraj P’25.

We were challenged to basically teach everything we know about Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® (ET&A™)  in a condensed three-day period at The Girls Foundation of Tanzania in Arusha, and then again at The Ganako Secondary School in Karatu, and at Secondary Education for Girls’ Advancement (SEGA) in Morogoro.

When we reflect on this experience, Tadeo and I can barely begin to describe how transformative it really was (yet we were asked to try for this article). So, we thought it would be fitting to highlight some of the memories and experiences we recalled during a conversation we had over hard-boiled eggs on our last day in Karatu, Tanzania.

Here are five things we learned while teaching entrepreneurship in Tanzania:

1. Languages Open Doors

I’m not entirely sure what we expected teaching would be like in Tanzania, but for some reason, we were all a little bit taken aback by just how much of a language barrier there was at times. You are in a room full of 100 boys and girls who are staring at you like deer in headlights as you try to explain entrepreneurship as a way of thinking. Even for the few who could follow us, they were often really shy and reserved.

So, in classic entrepreneurial spirit, my brother and I decided to collect as many phrases and words as possible in Swahili (the native language in Tanzania). Our MVP (minimally viable product) was a bunch of sticky notes with misspelled words. The next time we met with the group, we surprised them with full sentences and local slang. Heri ya mwaka mpya! Jina langu ni mateo! Jana ilikuwa siku nzuri kwa sababu Yanga ilishinda! (“Happy new year! My name is Mateo! Yesterday was a great day for me because Yanga”—a local soccer team I became a fan of—“won!”) They immediately burst out laughing, and now reflecting on it, it was probably thanks to our extremely thick accents and god-awful pronunciation.

Regardless, butchering through words and phrases, the children started to open up. They became more engaged and willing to participate. It was a really beautiful lesson on how speaking someone’s native tongue can make someone feel that much safer.

2. You’ve Got Everything You Need

Students huddle around a laptop to collaborate on a project

There is no way of saying this without falling short, but I had never seen such a brilliant and resourceful group of people. Naturally, they are very entrepreneurial.

I remember one day it was muda wa kucheza mpila (“time to play soccer”), and we all sprinted out onto the field. The only ball we could find was a small Nerf American football. Playing soccer with a football is near impossible, but suddenly the kids had come up with a game. The ball can’t bounce, and you get one touch. Every time someone kicked it, it would go in random directions and someone would jump in the air trying to hit an acroabati (“a bicycle kick”). It felt like, for a moment, a soccer ball wasn’t even a thing, and this was the way that soccer had always been played.

That was a really eye-opening experience that taught me a lot about the ways a true entrepreneur thinks. You’ve got everything you need.

3. Stop Giving, Start Collaborating

Teaching in Tanzania showed me that real change happens when you work with people, not for them.

My freshman year at Babson, I met a fellow student who inspired me to focus my energy into transforming the future generation of leaders. Her name was “Didi” Ding Mayen Kuai. Together, we started working on a project called LetAllGirls to educate the youth in underdeveloped communities, like her home country of South Sudan. Didi passed away shortly after we started working together, but her vision lives on with us today.

When going to Tanzania, I set my eyes on truly understanding the problems and the communities that I’ve devoted myself to serving. While there, I realized students and teachers didn’t need handouts—they needed partners. So, that has become our main focus now with LetAllGirls. I still talk daily to a rafiki (“friend”) of mine, Moses, who is a teacher at the school we visited in Karatu. Together, with him and multiple teachers, students, and community leaders across Tanzania, South Sudan, and Malawi, we are working on building something that is bound to have impact for years to come, in the education space.

A group of Tanzanian students pose for a photo with their certificates
Tadeo Acosta-Rubio MSEL’24 (front row, center) poses with students displaying their certificates.

4. No Problem Is Too Small

One of the activities we did with the students was called “needfinding,” a practice where we look around our daily lives, and list each and every problem we encounter. No problem is too small, and solutions aren’t even being considered at this point.

A common theme across all student groups was their emphasis on the environment and on education in their communities. They mentioned how whenever they walk to their nyumba (“house”), sokoni (“market”), shule (“school”), or kanisa (“church”), they would have to tread carefully so as not to step on dangerous trash littered across the roads, how their schools lacked enough textbooks for the students to study from, or how the cows in their farm would unknowingly eat trash.

What struck me most was how interconnected these things were to their livelihoods, and how inspired they were to want to solve these problems. In the next activities, we brainstormed ideas of how we could solve a specific problem, and their creativity flourished. Their ideas ranged from starting a milk company sourcing solely from well-maintained cows and recycling plastics into milk containers, to creating a nonprofit where the students spread the power of entrepreneurship across local communities in Tanzania by going to teach at schools and inspiring students to start businesses to reinvest into their schools.


“What struck me most was how interconnected these things were to their livelihoods, and how inspired they were to want to solve these problems.”
Mateo Acosta-Rubio ’27

5. Hakuna Matata

Hakuna matata is emblazoned across the Tanzania immigration sheet, woven into their culture, and now a daily reminder for me (thanks in part to a drawing made by one of my students that they gifted me on the last day). As they sung in The Lion King, “Hakuna matata, it means no worries for the rest of your days,” although I prefer the direct translation, “no problems.”

As both a life motto to always enjoy life, which they embodied whenever it was muda wa kucheza mpila (“time to play soccer”), muda wa chai (“time for tea”), or muda wa kwenda darasani (“time to go the classroom”), but also an innate cultural desire to solve problems in order to hakuna matata, have no problems.

I think this is one of the reasons the students took so well to entrepreneurship; they all are innate problem-solvers.

Posted in Community, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Insights

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