Dar es Salaam — Peace Corps Tanzania country director Nickie Séne says the U.S. volunteer agency must let Tanzanian institutions and communities define its work. She has identified vocational education, youth skills and technology as important to its next phase.
“It has to be driven by the needs that are felt by the people or the government,” Séne told The Chanzo in a Sept. 29 interview at the agency’s office in the city. “You can’t just keep doing things that were working in ‘61. You have to look at 2026 and the needs that are presented.”
The comments set out the approach of Séne, who arrived in late January after four years as Peace Corps country director in Cameroon. She has more than two decades of international experience and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa from 2006 to 2008.
The Peace Corps is an independent U.S. agency whose statutory purpose is to promote peace and friendship through work with host communities, cultural exchange and the experience volunteers take back to the United States. Its usual volunteer programme combines training with two years of work alongside a designated local counterpart.
In Tanzania, its current work is organised around agriculture, education and health. Its education volunteers teach secondary-school maths, science and English, while its health work includes HIV prevention, safe water and sanitation, malaria prevention, and maternal and child nutrition.
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Séne said the programme should not operate as a one-way transfer of expertise. Volunteers are placed with schools, government offices or other host institutions, she said, while communities identify secondary activities, from a tree nursery or water project to a youth club.
A vocational turn
Séne said the Ministry of Education had asked the agency to support vocational education, where plans to expand opportunities for young people require more practical STEM and digital skills. Peace Corps is preparing for volunteers to arrive in 2027, she said.
The agency currently seeks experienced STEM graduates for 12-month placements at vocational training centres, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, to update curricula, teach computer skills including artificial intelligence, and offer workforce-readiness and life-skills training; it gives a projected September 2027 departure date.
The plan reflects a wider effort to ask how technology can meet needs identified locally, Sene said. “We need to understand what it means to provide technology and AI for good,” Séne said during the interview, adding that education, agriculture and health would remain the main pillars.
She also said the agency wants Tanzanians involved while projects are being planned, rather than approaching them only after a volunteer has arrived. “We have to be intentional in creating mechanisms for that,” she emphasised.
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Séne was cautious about claims of impact. Peace Corps Tanzania collects volunteers’ reports and selected outputs, such as pupils taught or farmers trained, but she said it lacks resources for long-term evaluations that establish how far individual projects change communities over time.
“We cannot really measure the impact of that project,” Séne said. “It is impossible to measure the impact of a person.”
The programme is rebuilding after a disruption that began before the pandemic evacuation of volunteers. A total of 18 volunteers returned in February 2023 after 158 were repatriated in March 2020, and more than 3,200 Americans had served in Tanzania between September 1961 and March 2020.
Accountability
Séne also addressed the legacy of the August 24, 2019 crash in Dar es Salaam in which John Peterson, then the agency’s management and operations director, struck and killed Rabia Issa, a mother of three, and injured two other women.
Peterson was medically evacuated from Tanzania the same day and was not charged in Tanzania or the United States, according to an investigation by the U.S. newspaper USA Today.
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The investigation reported that the agency placed Peterson on administrative leave and suspended his security clearance while it investigated. He remained paid for more than a year before resigning, which the agency then said was because the rules did not allow unpaid status simply on the basis of a suspended security clearance.
Séne said cases in which staff violate the law are not treated as protected by the agency’s status. “Nobody has immunity,” she said, adding that the agency now uses such incidents in training as examples of conduct to avoid.
In a January 2022 statement, then Peace Corps chief executive Carol Spahn said the agency had agreed with Issa’s family to provide financial support for her sons. “There is more work to be done,” Spahn said, promising policy, legislative, training and other accountability measures.
One relevant legal change followed. The National Defence Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2022 amended the Foreign Service Act to allow unpaid suspension after a final written decision when there is reasonable cause to believe a Foreign Service member committed an imprisonable crime, or when a security clearance is suspended.
Peace Corps may use Foreign Service personnel authorities for overseas employees under its enabling law. A later Peace Corps Reauthorization Act would have expressly created an unpaid-suspension power for serious misconduct, but remained a bill in committee and did not become law, Congress.gov records show.
Séne said her understanding is that the agency now has a mechanism to place an employee under investigation on leave without pay. The public statute supplies the broader Foreign Service authority, subject to written notice and other procedural requirements.
For Séne, the test of the programme’s future is whether it is trusted enough to hear difficult concerns as well as requests for assistance.
“Sometimes the best feedback you get is things that you don’t want to hear,” she told The Chanzo during the interview published on Oct. 15. “If we don’t listen to that, we’re never going to evolve and become better.”
