The chartreuse rubber bracelets have a simple saying: If you educate a girl, you educate a nation.

Made by honors students at Sweet Home High School, the bands are being sold to raise funds to build a school for girls in a remote northern village of Tanzania, where needs are great and resources are few.

The bracelet project is part of a communitywide effort led by the University at Buffalo to make a difference in the lives of girls who are often devalued and left with few options in life.

Parents [in Tanzania] do not have money to send their kids to school and force the girls to get married when they are extremely young —12 and 13 years old, said Sister Janepha Kudema one of two Tanzanian nuns in Buffalo studying business and economics on a scholarship at D 'Youville College. She noted it is culturally important to exchange daughters in marriage for valuable dowries.

The alternative is often not much of an option, either. For those who don 't want to get married, they run away from their families to the big cities, and because they don 't have education and no one can hire them, they get into prostitution and eventually die from HIV/AIDS, Kudema said.

AIDS is the leading cause of death for adults in a country where life expectancy in 2005 was 51. Forced female circumcision also claims the lives of many girls.

Mara Huber, director of UB 's Center for Educational Collaboration, embraced the idea of the Tanzanian school after hearing about it from Kudema and her colleague at her mother-in-law 's Amherst home on Christmas Day 2007. The nuns described how classes in the Musoma village are held in fields.

Huber was immediately struck when they noted the village is in the Mara Region her first name. More than 1 million people live there, and it is home to Serengeti National Park, one of the largest animal sanctuaries in the world.

I thought it was a pretty amazing coincidence, Huber said, referring to the name. Then, when they explained why they were in this country, and found out the nature of my work, that coincidence became, I think, even more compelling.

What has also attracted Huber to the project is the opportunity to tie together girls and women across continents and generations.

The power of this project lies in the connections we 're making, in Western New York and all the way to Tanzania. It will be life changing for the girls in this village, because going to school . . . makes such a profound difference in their lives, Huber said.

When I see the project through my daughter 's eyes, I know that there are no limits to what we can accomplish together.

What began as Huber 's personal commitment evolved into the broader Buffalo-Tanzania Education Project, which has the dream of building a prekindergarten- to-12th-grade campus for 1,500 girls. The development of two classrooms by next summer is now seen as the first step toward that goal.

The school will be run by the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Africa, which already operates the Kowak School for Girls in the Kitenga village.

Six UB academics and two members of community organizations will travel to Tanzania later this month to see the community 's needs first hand.

Huber said the campaign model was developed through UB 's partnership with the Buffalo Public Schools. As in Buffalo, areas of need in Tanzania are being matched with local experts and resources to address the challenges. There is also a strong focus on research and evaluation.

Not only does the university have an obligation to address these complex social issues, but we have a unique opportunity to study the solutions and form models for engagement that can be tested, replicated and scaled up, Huber said.

Katie Biggie, a UB education outreach coordinator, was attracted to the project because she felt it could make a profound difference in a culture in which a family 's lineage and assets are passed on through the male, and girls are seen as a burden who drain scarce resources.

In June, 35 freshmen and sophomore honors students at Sweet Home High School sponsored a fundraiser featuring an African drum and dance group. That event, along with sales of the bracelets, brought in $1,000, according to English teacher Peter Dobmeier, who coordinates the honors program.

A dozen students at Grover Cleveland High School wrote letters to girls in the Musoma village, relying on the nuns to translate. And another group of children, including Mara Huber 's 8-year-old daughter, Elena, helped put on a fundraiser June 14 that raised nearly $2,000 and produced a photo book for girls in Tanzania to start a correspondence.

Godfrey Telli, who came to UB from Tanzania in 2006 as a Fulbright Scholar and is currently a graduate assistant in a doctoral program for education administration, said the reliance on girls to do domestic work is a big incentive for parents to keep them out of school. In addition, pregnant girls are prevented from attending, another hurdle in educating girls.

Still, Telli said school can make a huge difference in the lives of girls, and in the lives of males, too.

Most of the time, people tend to change when they see action on the ground. This school will change the lives of the girls, of the villagers, and eventually will be a role model for other parts of Tanzania, Telli said.

Kudema agreed, saying she has seen the difference in the girls at the Kowak school.

The girls there are different they express themselves very well. You can hear the way they talk that they know what they want to do with their lives, Kudema said.