Sarah Edgar Lamba is the Founder and Executive Director of Saveelders Tanzania, a programme that aims to transform older people's lives through community advocacy. So far, through Saveelders Tanzania she has reached more than 1000 older people in Tanzania through a number of projects, and recruited over 50 younger volunteers through social media campaigns. What sets Sarah Edgar Lamba’s work apart is her commitment to foster healthy ageing through fostering intergenerational solidarity: for example, through social media youth are invited to volunteer to work on identifying older people who are in need and act as champions to mobilize and support projects toward improving the livelihood of older people.
Sarah Edgar Lamba’s projects are also based on transforming older people’s livelihoods through the provision of information on healthy ageing: she calls and provides older people with health promoting information, promotes access to home gardens by providing seeds and education on how to start them, and prepares sessions and gatherings that educated older people on the human rights they are entitled to.
As with other parts of the world, older people in Tanzania were also negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, Sarah Edgar Lamba launched a project called WANABA (an abbreviation that stands for Wazee na Barakoa, ‘Older people and face mask’) that educated older people on how to wear face masks properly and how to maintain proper hygiene and handwashing habits to protect themselves from the illness. But this too was implemented by younger volunteers who learned how educate others on the proper methods via social media.
Within under-resourced settings, Sarah Edgar Lamba has worked to not only provide deprived older people with the support they need to maintain health and well-being, but also address ageism and community solidarity by bringing generations together in this support work. This multi-pronged approach to fostering healthy ageing is an inspirational example that shows it is possible to achieve synergistic outcomes that address systemic transformations rather than focusing on narrow problem solving.