NYU students worked alongside professionals and community members in Tanzania to develop practical solutions to climate-related challenges in low-income communities.
A community in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Climate change can make weather events more extreme—from droughts and wildfires to heat waves and major storms. In poor neighborhoods of Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, heavy rainfalls regularly overwhelm blocked drainage systems and flood homes, filling living rooms with garbage and human waste. These floods can lead to contaminated drinking water and illnesses like cholera.
That made the city a fitting setting this May and June for an NYU course focusing on strategies for how to limit those dangerous impacts. Developed in collaboration with UNICEF and hosted by the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Science (MUHAS), the goal of the course—A Systems Approach to Climate Change: Efficient Strategies for Local Mitigation—was to work with local communities to design realistic, cost-effective programs that respond to complex health challenges driven by climate change and poverty.
Students and community members develop a systems map
Chris Dickey, a clinical associate professor of global and environmental health at NYU School of Global Public Health, has taught versions of this class for the past 11 years all over the world, from Abu Dhabi and Asunción to Accra and Beirut. The locations and topics are driven by invitations from local or regional UNICEF offices, who reach out when their constituencies have a need. In recent years, courses have focused on vaccine hesitancy in the Middle East and North Africa and the mental health of Ukrainian refugees in Europe. More than 1,000 alumni of the course are now working across more than 100 countries.
Notably, its enrollment goes beyond who you’d typically find in a college classroom: government and NGO professionals in the class work on teams alongside NYU students. Together, they build skills to interact directly with community members so that their priorities and perspectives become the foundation of strategies to improve health and wellness.
Collected recyclables in Dar es Salaam
“In my mind, one of the reasons why public health programs fail so frequently is that we tend to have people in London and New York and Geneva come up with programs, and then impose them on a community,” said Dickey. “This course grew out of a desire to change that dynamic and to have those programs start with the community in a ground-up approach.”
When the UNICEF Tanzania Country Office approached Dickey about building local capacity around climate change and public health, he teamed up with two NYU colleagues to bring the course to fruition: NYU Steinhardt Associate Professor of International Education Carol Anne Spreen, an expert in international education, ethics, and human rights, and Olajumoke Ayandele of the Center for Global Affairs at the NYU School of Professional Studies, an expert in African governance and policy.
The class in Tanzania included 29 NYU graduate students from the School of Global Public Health, Steinhardt, the School of Professional Studies, Meyers, and Wagner; junior faculty members from MUHAS; and professionals from UNICEF, local and global NGOs, and government partners working in Tanzania’s capital of Dodoma and in Zanzibar. The hybrid course started with several weeks of online learning, followed by a week-long intensive in Tanzania.
One of the first days in Dar es Salaam was spent in the Ilala and Temeke Districts, both severely impoverished neighborhoods with limited public infrastructure, where students spoke with community members about how they are affected by climate change and what strategies they use to cope with its effects.
“It’s so important to start by talking with people in these communities because the effects of climate change are a thousand times more profound for them than they are for those of us in New York City. If there's flooding, a disease outbreak, any kind of local conflict or loss of income, they immediately feel it,” said Dickey.
While in the communities, each team of students developed a “systems map,” a tool to visualize the complexity of a given problem. Starting with a blank piece of paper, community members listed out the factors that may be driving a particular challenge and added context that can only come from lived experience.
Many residents cited waste management as a critical issue facing their communities. When plastic bottles and other trash block the settlement’s drains, homes easily flood when it rains and residents fall ill from waterborne diseases. Flooding also causes borehole latrines, which are common in households, to overflow and release their contents into the main drainage creeks and people’s homes.
For the rest of the week in Dar es Salaam, the teams developed programs to tackle the issues that emerged—waste, food insecurity and school nutrition, clean drinking water, and more—complete with budgets, timelines, and plans for monitoring and evaluation. On the final day of the course, the 12 teams presented their strategies to a panel of judges, including senior officials from UNICEF and the government of Tanzania.
Trash accumulation in a Dar es Salaam neighborhood
Two of the projects focused on waste management are now poised to make their way from the classroom to the outside world. The winning project chosen by the judges will receive seed funding to improve waste management collection and prevent clogged drainage systems in a Temeke district ward. Another project—a pilot program to compost food scraps and generate fertilizer and animal feed—will be funded by a grant from Joel Holsinger, a member of the NYU School of Global Public Health Dean’s Council, who funded the implementation of projects from previous courses focused on cholera in Malawi and HPV vaccination in Ghana.
Students reflected that the applied nature of the course—including the opportunity to implement a project and the chance to work so closely with professionals and members of affected communities—not only reinforced, but in many cases surpassed, the insights gained in traditional classroom settings.
Students and community members collaborate on a project
“This course is a wonderful example of collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to addressing real-world problems like the climate crisis,” noted Spreen. “Students not only learned about the complex and intersectional issues around addressing the climate crisis, but also how to work in collaborative teams and with local community representatives to design realistic programs and implementable initiatives that have the potential to help vulnerable groups.”
“This wasn’t just a class—it was a portal into the real-world complexity of global development,” added Ayandele. “Students moved beyond theory to witness the lived realities of communities and learned to map not just problems, but the interconnected systems and people behind them. These experiences don’t just teach—they transform.”
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