Transforming Tanzania January – August 2025 update
Transforming Tanzania continued to pursue its calling of serving both the spiritual and physical needs of communities across the Mara & Ukerewe Diocese for the January- August 2025 period. Rooted in the love of Christ and empowered by the generous support of friends and partner churches in the United States, the ministry continued implementing ministry initiatives and projects that bring hope, dignity, and transformation to some of the most impoverished communities in Tanzania.
WORD
From the beginning of the year, God was very gracious in enabling the ministry to accomplish significant milestones. In January 2025, Transform Tanzania held a Women’s Conference, bringing together more than 200 women from different churches and communities in the region. The conference was a time of encouragement, spiritual renewal, and empowerment, equipping women to grow in their faith and strengthen their roles within their families, churches, and society. Six months after the Women’s conference, the ministry hosted a Pastors’ Conference, where more than 425 pastors and their wives gathered for teaching, fellowship, and spiritual refreshment. These conferences not only continued to provide biblical and leadership training but also offered a rare opportunity for pastors serving in challenging contexts to be renewed and strengthened in their calling.
WATER and CHURCH AND COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION PROCESS
Alongside these spiritual initiatives, Transforming Tanzania has remained committed to addressing one of the most pressing physical needs in many Tanzanian communities—access to clean and safe drinking water. Between January and August 2025, the ministry successfully drilled 18 deep water wells, bringing the number to 179 wells drilled in churches and local communities in Northern Tanzania. These wells have made safe water accessible to over half a million people, reducing the burden of water scarcity, improving health outcomes, and restoring dignity to families who once walked long distances to unsafe water sources, thus negatively impacting especially children and women. The impact of these wells has gone beyond physical health, as they also serve as testimonies of God’s love expressed through practical action, hence bringing hundreds of people to faith in Christ over the years.
Through Transforming Tanzania, Peter Ngwili and his team continued to implement the Church and Community Transformation Program (CCMP), a unique empowerment initiative that equips churches to become salt and light within their communities. Within the last eight months, two training sessions were held for a team of over 30 pastors—including 10 fully trained graduates of the program and 20 new trainees who are currently being mentored to equip over 15 additional congregations. Through this program, pastors and church leaders have been equipped with practical skills on how to mobilize and use God-given resources to meet their basic needs and undertake sustainable transformation in their lives, families, churches, and communities. A recent visiting team from New Harvest Missions’ international team in Togo (West Africa, ) testified that they had never witnessed such a life-transforming initiative despite having been in the development field for several decades. This program is now completed or underway in 55 congregations among the 202 local churches in the Diocese. These churches are becoming catalysts for holistic change and transformation, giving thousands of people present, future, and eternal hope.
WELLNESS
The recent completion of a two-theater surgical suite at the main Health Center in Bweri, Musoma will provide much needed medical services for the growing population in the region. For years, friends of Transforming Tanzania and the Diocese have hoped and prayed that God would make it possible to send surgical teams to Tanzania in support of the work of the medical staff at the Center. A very exciting recent development is the interest of the Global Surgical Inititiave of the University of Tennessee Medical School in partnering with the Center. Plans are being made by the GSI to send a team in the summer of 2026!
PRAYER REQUESTS
All of these accomplishments have been made possible through the faithful prayers, generosity, and support of individual friends and churches in the United States. Together, we are witnessing holistic transformation—spiritual lives strengthened through conferences, physical lives restored through clean water access, communities empowered through the Church and Community Transformation program, and improved medical care available to those in need.
As we come to the final quarter of the year, we are very humbled to say that it is through your giving and intercession that all of this is being accomplished. While we are thankful for all of the ways that God has used you, we want particularly to acknowledge your support of Peter’s work. Your partnership is a living testimony of God’s love in action, and together, we are seeing lives changed both physically and spiritually for the glory of His name.
We thank God for you and pray that He will continue to bless you abundantly, strengthen your faith, and multiply the fruits of your generosity.
Thanksgiving and Prayer Requests
- Thank God with us for the continued mystery of His amazing provision for the ministry needs here through his wonderful and amazing people, which has enabled Transforming Tanzania to register all the above achievements for God’s glory.
- Thank God with us for the continued availability, dedication and commitment of individual members and church ministers from the USA who have continued to make themselves faithfully and sacrificially available to come to Tanzania every year through the short-term mission trips for ministry in the women’s conferences, the pastors’ conferences and medical mission trips and pray that many more will make that commitment in the coming years.
- Thank God with us for the recent completion and launching of the surgical suite at the Bweri health centre, which has seen the average number of clients served by the facility rise from 60 to 80 patients per day. This increase has been seen within a period of only two months since the unit became operational.
- Pray that God continues to provide the resources needed to drill more wells in the remaining communities still waiting for clean and safe drinking water in their localities, and in villages where, by God’s grace, 50 churches will be planted in the next five years.
- Pray for God’s provision for the replacement of electronic medical equipment and medicines valued at approximately $17,000 following recent floods that hit and negatively impacted our AICT Bweri Health Center, paralysing all the operations for a day on the 19th of August 2025.
- Pray with us that the church, friends, and well-wishers will generously give towards replacing the current Bishop’s vehicle, which is significantly worn out and unable to cope with the roads here after over 15 years of faithful service, almost daily, nonstop.
- Continue to pray with us that the integration of the Deep-Water Wells and the Church and Community Transformation initiatives under Transforming Tanzania will continue not only to transform churches and communities physically, but also remain powerful tools for evangelism and the holistic transformation of individual lives, families, churches, and communities.
With deep and heart-felt gratitude,
Peter Ngwili, Director of Community Development, and the Transforming Tanzania partnership