You are not the only one still looking

If you are reading this between applications that no one has answered, you already know the shape of it. The job did not taper off. It ended in a single morning, in an email that may not have used your name, for reasons that had nothing to do with how well you did it. One day you were running the programme. The next you were explaining to your family why the programme was gone.

What makes this harder than an ordinary job loss is that the work was not only income. It was the answer you gave when people asked who you were. You spent years becoming good at something specific, the health outreach, the field monitoring, the agricultural extension, the protection casework, and that expertise does not fold neatly into another life. And the grief is not really for yourself. It is for the clients who lost their ARVs, the girls whose programme stopped mid year, the communities that were months from a milestone, all of it dismissed in public as waste by people who never saw the work.

Here is what is also true, and what no one says to your face: almost everyone you would normally call is in the same position. Tanzania's development sector did not shrink quietly. After the 2025 US aid freeze, global aid fell by nearly a quarter in a single year, the steepest drop ever recorded, and more than 258,000 sector jobs disappeared worldwide. In Tanzania the HIV, family planning, conservation, agriculture and youth programmes that anchored a generation of careers closed or were cut to the bone, and late in the year the European Union froze a further 156 million euros. The market you are competing in is smaller and more crowded at the same time. The silence after your applications is not about you.

What comes next, none of us can promise. The roles that are left look different from the ones that disappeared, and they are scattered across organisations that no longer post in one place. We cannot tell you the sector is coming back. We can only make the part we control easier: every opening we can find, kept in one place, so that the search is not one more thing you carry alone.

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