Rescue, rehabilitate, and rehome dogs and cats while working to shift cultural attitudes toward animal treatment. This hands-on program splits your time between shelter-based animal care and community outreach, where you'll work alongside a qualified veterinarian administering vaccines, educating pet owners, rescuing street animals, and providing medical treatment to injured or abused animals. This isn't just about caring for animals – it's about changing minds and creating a more compassionate future.
Target Community
You'll serve the street dogs, cats, donkeys, cows, and many more of Arusha (we've even had some lucky ones work with Baby Giraffe!)– animals who face abuse, neglect, injury, and illness with nowhere to turn. Many have been mistreated or abandoned, suffering on the streets without care. You'll also work with local pet owners and community members, many of whom have never learned proper animal care or the importance of vaccination and humane treatment. Your work directly impacts both the animals you rescue and the community's evolving understanding of animal welfare.
The Challenge
In Tanzania, as in many developing countries, cultural attitudes toward animals differ significantly from Western perspectives. Street dogs and cats are often viewed as nuisances rather than creatures deserving care and compassion. Abuse is common, veterinary care is scarce, and vaccination rates are low, creating public health risks like rabies. Without intervention, these animals suffer, and the cycle continues. The local animal shelter is overwhelmed by the growing population of animals in need, requiring more hands, more resources, and more community education to create lasting change.
Our Partnership Approach
We work directly with a local animal shelter and qualified veterinarian who are pioneering animal welfare in Arusha. You'll contribute to both immediate animal care and long-term cultural change through community education and outreach. The shelter rescues dogs and cats, provides medical treatment, and works to find responsible homes – creating a sustainable model for animal welfare. You'll work within your skills and capabilities under professional veterinary supervision, ensuring both your safety and the animals' wellbeing.
Your Role & Hands-On Activities
Shelter-Based Animal Care:
- Medical Recovery Support: Care for animals recovering from injuries, illness, or abuse
- Vaccination Assistance: Help administer vaccines and preventative treatments under veterinary supervision
- General Animal Care: Feed, clean, exercise, and provide daily care for shelter dogs and cats
- Rehabilitation: Support animals' physical and emotional recovery, helping them become adoptable
- Enrichment Activities: Provide play, socialization, and enrichment that improves animals' quality of life
- Adoption Support: Help prepare animals for adoption and assist with finding responsible homes
- Facility Maintenance: Keep the shelter clean, safe, and comfortable for the animals
Community Outreach:
- Home Visits: Accompany the vet to pet owners' homes to administer vaccines and provide care
- Animal Rescue: Participate in rescuing street animals who are injured, sick, or in danger
- Community Education: Teach community members about proper animal treatment, care, and welfare
- Public Awareness: Help shift cultural attitudes toward more compassionate animal treatment
- Preventative Care: Promote vaccination and responsible pet ownership to improve public health
What You'll Learn & Gain- Veterinary Skills: Learn basic animal care, medical treatment, and veterinary assistance under professional supervision
- Animal Behavior: Understand dog and cat behavior, rehabilitation needs, and socialization techniques
- Cross-Cultural Animal Welfare: Navigate cultural differences in animal treatment and learn effective advocacy approaches
- Community Education Skills: Develop ability to educate and influence attitudes in culturally sensitive ways
- Rescue Operations: Gain experience in animal rescue, assessment, and emergency care
- Compassionate Leadership: Build confidence advocating for vulnerable animals while respecting cultural contexts
- Public Health Understanding: Learn connections between animal welfare, vaccination, and community health
- Personal Growth: Develop resilience, empathy, and a deeper commitment to animal welfare
Turn Your Volunteer Experience Into an Accredited Diploma
Your time volunteering can become much more than an unforgettable experience. Alongside your placement, you have the opportunity to complete an internationally recognised accredited diploma, built entirely around the work you're already doing in Tanzania. With no exams and only a small amount of additional work completed online throughout your programme, you'll graduate with a recognised qualification that can strengthen your CV, support university applications and, in many countries, even contribute towards academic credit.
Managing Your Expectations: The Reality of Volunteering
Whilst we do our best to be as accurate as possible with what to expect on your program, the nature of volunteering is fundamentally about coming to one of the most challenged parts of the world, learning to understand the barriers and challenges surrounding community development, and then being flexible, adaptable, and proactive in working on solutions to how you can be of best benefit during your time there.
Volunteering is, more than anything, a learning experience—so please always expect the unexpected. It's not a curated or meticulously planned travel experience. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You might find that some community members are incredibly welcoming from day one, eager to have you lead activities and drive initiatives. Others may be more skeptical or hesitant to have you heavily involved right away, preferring to continue with their established ways of doing things.
Don't let this worry you, and don't be quick to assume you're in the wrong place. Take the time to adapt to a new culture and its challenges. Focus first and foremost on building rapport with those you're working with—get to know the students, teachers, NGO staff, and community members. Show respect, demonstrate that you're not there to immediately change their ways, and then slowly and respectfully introduce ideas about how you could be better involved, support classroom management, or share the workload.
If you find you're not doing what you expected, please lean on our coordinators for support—there is almost always a solution, and that's exactly what they're there for.
Ultimately, our volunteers are the ones who drive all of our initiatives as an organization. Our core focus is on capacity building and making sustainable improvements through sharing ideas, skills, and knowledge. As such, we cannot always provide a pre-set, specifically structured experience. We can, however, guide, support, and equip you along the way.
The volunteers who are flexible, open-minded, adaptable, willing to work through challenges, and take the most initiative in their programs are always the ones who have the best and most enriching experiences!
