“Helping one person might not change the whole world, but it can change the world for one person.” Sarah Ali.
Hygiene starts with soap. Everyone knows this but not all have access to this necessary commodity. Vijiti, Hindi for “victory” or “triumph,” is an organization started by Sarah Ali when she was only 16 years old, to counter this problem. A year into her new venture, she hopes to ignite the spark of service in others.
Following the death of her brother, and trying to cope with his loss, Sarah participated in the Global Encounters program in Kenya. There, she saw first-hand the poverty and needs of rural residents, leading her to research local needs. During the visit, participants made an assessment of needs—that included a chicken coop to control the fowl—and they encouraged critical thinking skills by teaching resident students to play chess. Additionally, they helped students with reading and writing skills, teaching them basic word pronunciations, and engaging them by building a library.
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She identified organizations focused on food, education, and empowerment for women in Kenya. However, she realized that there was a gap in service for basic health care that needed to be addressed. She also recognized that services provided by other organizations were creating change through charity, which leads to dependency and cannot be sustainable.
Vijiti was a result of her conviction that even small interventions can have a major impact, and the three pillars of the organization are healthcare, enlightenment, and awareness. Sarah reminisces about her vision and its obstacles: “as someone who has started a nonprofit at a young age, I definitely had a lot of people doubt me. Something I realized, however, is that it doesn’t take a big, powerful person to do something impactful in the world.”
As the founder and CEO, Sarah’s role is to supervise the projects, apply for grants and build partnerships with companies and other non-profit organizations to facilitate change. With more than 20 volunteers currently involved, Vijiti will be shipping out their first shipment to serve approximately 2,000 children in six Tanzanian schools.
There are four different care kits designed to accommodate care for children, women, and two other packages designed to facilitate health. Both care kits provide supplies to provide basic hygiene and medical supplies which are not readily accessible in the country. They allow parents to be able to apply their own skill sets and solve minor issues that hospitals and clinics cannot provide. Each kit also has a motivational note for its recipients.
This is Vijiti’s first shipment and it will send approximately 2,000 bars of soap. Sarah collaborated with Eco-Soap Bank, another non-profit started by an Ismaili, Samir Lakhani (named a CNN Hero), that delivers soap to children in developing countries. Eco-soap collects used soap from hotels located in Cambodia and in other regions, including Tanzania, employs economically disadvantaged women to sanitize and process the soap into new bars at local hubs, and partners with other organizations to distribute the soap to schools, communities, and health clinics.
With the partnership with Eco-Soap, Sarah’s team created a hygiene curriculum to initially train teachers at schools to provide hygiene education to students. Providing soap and then pairing it with ongoing hygiene education allows the community to form healthy lifelong habits. The next goal is to provide hygiene kits, which will include toothbrushes, toothpaste, adhesive bandages, blunt scissors, acetaminophen, etc.
Sarah has come to a point in her young life when she acknowledges the needs of others for basic human rights, dignity, and wants to help them reach their potential. She believes everyone has the “power to prevent another family from experiencing pain and loss similar to mine and the act of giving, helped heal me.”
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A vision for Vijiti in the upcoming years is to create a platform to engage doctors and professionals who will contribute their time and knowledge in creating health solutions at the grassroots in local communities in the developing world.
Sarah has been featured in TEDx talk and has said, “even the smallest person with the brightest passion can make the biggest difference. If you have a passion, be bold and work to achieve it.”
There must be more than 24 hours in her day, as she is a team lead for the Youth Volunteer Corps, an early childhood development teacher, volunteers at a children’s hospital, and has been a Camp Mosaic counselor—all this while studying and operating Vijiti. Sarah plans to study the pre-medicine track in college.
Clearly, Sarah has demonstrated that age is no barrier to having and implementing a grand vision that can help humanity, and that from tragedy can spring fountains of altruism.
