Language is not just spoken, it’s also how we listen. At D-tree, our team works alongside midwives in remote clinics, people recently diagnosed with diabetes and government officials deciding where to put limited resources. To truly understand their realities, you need to speak the same language. For most of our Tanzania team, that language is Kiswahili. Today, on World Kiswahili Day, four colleagues – Hannah, Grace, Jimmy, Gloria – share what it means to do our work in Kiswahili.
What’s clear is that they couldn’t show up to the people, health workers and governments we support as compassionate and honest without knowing Kiswahili. It changes the work and the quality of it.
Hannah: Listening harder
Kiswahili didn’t become mine through a classroom, but through years of conversations, meetings and moments where getting it wrong taught me more than getting it right.
Learning Kiswahili has taught me that language signals something before a single idea is exchanged. Walking into a meeting and speaking Kiswahili, even if it’s not perfect, changes the atmosphere of a room. I feel it in how people respond: more openly, less formally, more willing to say what they actually think. And that really matters in our work – what health workers and government colleagues are actually willing to share is everything.
The language gives me access to conversation and relationships. I also deeply respect Zanzibar’s norm of holding meetings in Kiswahili by default, rather than switching to English when non-speakers are present. It signals confidence in the language’s place in governance and daily life and it shapes how work happens here.
Working in a non-native language does cost something: the ability to express myself with full fluency, but it really gives something back too. It forces me to listen harder and to rely less on my assumptions.
Grace: Signalling who belongs in the room
Learning and communicating in Kiswahili has been the norm for me for a long time. From my earliest days, uttering my first words (mama, baba) to exchanging giggles and gossip as a teenager, and as an adult, navigating through both my professional and personal life, all these core memories were and continue to be woven in Kiswahili.
There’s a moment that keeps repeating itself when I think about Kiswahili in relation to my work. During trainings on our digital app, the question that comes up again and again from community health workers is whether the app will be available in Kiswahili.
Every time we say yes, something shifts. And we always say yes because developing in Kiswahili is important to the people we serve, so we keep doing it.
Kiswahili also opens doors in government settings that would otherwise stay closed. When dialogues are held in Kiswahili, government representatives speak more freely, raise ideas more confidently and push back more honestly. That kind of exchange is what makes our partnerships actually work.
To me, language isn’t just how we communicate. It’s how we signal who belongs in the room.
Jimmy: Changing the room
Growing up in a village in Kilimanjaro, I primarily communicated in both Kiswahili and Ki- Chagga, my mother tongue. When I later moved from the village to town, I realized that many of my colleagues in town were more comfortable expressing themselves in Kiswahili. This made me feel like I had to catch up and that experience gave me something useful. I know what it feels like when a language makes you feel different.
I see the opposite of this in meetings sometimes. When the team shifts from English to Kiswahili, the room really changes. For many Tanzanians, English is a third or even fourth language that they learned in school between the ages of eight and ten. When we communicate in Kiswahili, people participate more and speak more freely. They share ideas they might have held back. It gives people confidence to be able to speak the language they know best.
Kiswahili has given me the ability to connect with people in a more inclusive and culturally meaningful way.
Using Kiswahili also demonstrates respect, particularly when interacting directly with people in communities. This helps create trust, improve collaboration, and enable more effective communication in the execution of our work.
Gloria: Fresh perspectives
Born and raised in Dar es Salaam, I was also born into Kiswahili, where it’s the language of homes and streets. It was waiting for me before I could speak, probably arriving before even Kihaya, my parents’ first language. School sharpened it. Life deepened it. And yet, even now, some Kiswahili vocabulary still catches me off guard. The language keeps teaching.
What shifted in my work was coming from an English-language education into a setting where Kiswahili is embedded in everything: how we design projects, build tools for health workers, run trainings, engage government officials. That transition gave me a fresh perspective. I had to be deliberate in a way I hadn’t been before.
What you say in Kiswahili really matters, but so does how you say it, especially across different settings. A primary healthcare facility is not a government meeting room, and the language has to change accordingly. I learned to choose my words carefully.
What Kiswahili gives me more than any other language is a sense of belonging, and, honestly, privilege. D-tree is an international organisation with diverse staff. Being in an office where Kiswahili is spoken freely, almost all the time, reminds me I’m exactly where I should be. It gives me access to staff, communities, health workers and partners in ways that would simply not be possible otherwise.
Designing for and with people
Across their reflections, the same thing keeps surfacing: Kiswahili isn’t just a practical tool for them. It tells health workers, government officials and community members that they were thought of and that they belong in the conversation. And when people feel that, they participate differently. They share more, push back more honestly and engage more fully. And this is crucial as we’re trying to understand people’s real lives and find solutions that can improve their most pressing challenges.
