The School That Hope Built: The inspirational Australian woman using education to fight poverty in Africa

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From a country town in Australia to a small village in Tanzania, Gemma Sisia has built a truly remarkable legacy.

In 2002, Gemma founded The School of St Jude in her husband's home country of Tanzania, with the goal of empowering local Tanzanians to build a school community unlike any other.

From humble beginnings, with just three students and one volunteer teacher, St Jude's now provides free education to over 1,800 Tanzanian school students and supplies more than 10,000 government school students with volunteer teachers each year. St Jude's also supports its alumni to become the doctors, engineers, tradespeople, entrepreneurs and teachers of the next generation.


Sharing the incredible twenty-year journey from an Australian girl's simple vision to an educational powerhouse with 350 local staff, The School That Hope Built reveals how St Jude's is breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty one student at a time.

Author Bio

Madeleine Kelly was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1994. In her high school years, Madeleine travelled to Argentina and to Pipalyatjara, a remote community in the APY Lands. These experiences nurtured Madeleine's love for writing about cultural immersion and connection. Madeleine graduated from The University of Adelaide in 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and moved to Tanzania to work at The School of St Jude, where she spent the next five years supporting the school's communications and alumni teams. In 2021, Madeleine was invited to research and write the second stage of the school's remarkable story of growth as the vision of its founder, Gemma Sisia, and her dedicated supporters to fight poverty through education. provides hope for thousands of Tanzanian children and their families. A School in Africa is Madeleine's first book. Her work in Tanzania for now complete, Madeleine returned to Australia in 2022.