Focus on education initiatives

When challenged by World Bank officials about the failure of his policies, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's first president and a strong advocate of education, is reported to have said: "The British Empire left us a country with 85 percent illiterates, two engineers and twelve doctors. When I left office, we had nine percent illiterates and thousands of engineers and doctors." However, over the next 15 years education was practically forgotten and, by 2000, just 55 percent of seven-year-olds were enrolling in primary schools, most of which were poorly maintained and lacking teachers, according to government figures. Responding to the goal of universal primary education by the year 2015, set at the World Education Forum in Senegal in 2000, Tanzania in 2001 stepped up efforts to reinstate education as a priority with the launching of its Primary Education Development Plan (PEDEP). Major obstacle removed So far, the biggest boost to these efforts was the decision in 2002 to waive school fees for primary school students. "We have enrolment coming in very significantly," Minister for Education and Culture Joseph Mungai told IRIN. "Net enrolment [number of seven-year-olds enroling] is up to 85 percent". However, Mungai acknowledged that it would take more than merely increasing numbers of children that go to primary school to solve the problem. "There is no enrolment problem. The problem lies in the infrastructure and the inadequate numbers of teachers," he conceded. "We lack school buildings and classrooms and, as a result, in Dar es Salaam, our average class size is 145 children per classroom. This is far too much for efficient teaching. We also went through a period when the government was unable to employ teachers." The most recent situation analysis of children in Tanzania, published by UNICEF, the UN Children's Agency, supports this view. "In 2001, on virtually every measure the quality of primary education in Tanzania is extremely poor. The infrastructure is in a state of disrepair, there is a serious shortage of books and other learning materials, teachers are poorly trained and unmotivated, methods of teaching stifle learning, and the overall school environment is characterised by fear and boredom rather than interaction and real learning," it says. However, Mungai said these issues would be tackled through the PEDEP, primarily through increasing the amount of money spent annually on a primary school child's education from just US $1 to US $10. The funds would then be channelled into providing communities with development grants for buildings, constructing another 13,000 classrooms this year and procuring a sufficient amount of teaching and learning materials, he added. Focus on the children Officials at UNICEF lauded these efforts, but highlighted other issues that also needed to be tackled. "There are a lot of positives in what the government is doing and how parents are responding, but there is still a lot to be desired to bring the child to the forefront," stressed Iluminata Tukai, a basic education specialist at UNICEF. "A better relationship between the three main parties - the child, the teacher and the parents - would make the child want to go to school more in the morning," she added. While promoting children's participation through pupil's councils, Tukai added that, in order to ensure greater accountability and sustainability, the community and, more specifically, parents should be brought in to contribute to the management of the school. Recovering lost generations Observers have noted that while these initial enrolment rates are impressive, unless quality improvements are carried through, the numbers of children that end up dropping out of school would rise even more. UNICEF estimates that in Tanzania, there are some three million children and adolescents that never entered primary school, or dropped out before completing the primary cycle. As a result, the government and it's development partners have developed a complementary learning system, known as Complementary Basic Learning in Tanzania (COBET). Although still at a pilot stage, the project, which aims to give out-of-school children the chance to complete basic education through a specialised three-year study, is being seen as an essential initiative to address the backlog of overage children, especially since the government is now concentrating on the seven-to-ten age bracket. "We are seeing some positive results from this initiative," explains Mary Eyakuze, who works on COBET at UNICEF. "We are waiting for the exam results, but in the mocks for the Standard 4 [completion of primary school] exams, the COBET students are said to have done very well." Eyakuze puts the fast progress shown by these students down to an improved and more focused curriculum, enhanced interaction, teachers that are constantly reviewing teaching methods and sufficient and improved learning materials. Secondary education lagging Tanzania's secondary schools have made some progress over the last decade, but, critics say, are still very much languishing. "Our net enrolment ratio is just under seven percent [262,000 students], which is one of the lowest in the world," Tanzania's Education Minister admits. "This is because policy initiatives were not properly balanced when we universalised primary education during Mwalimu's [Julius Nyerere] time. There was a primary school in every village, but there wasn't a publicly-funded expansion at the secondary school level." This policy has left Tanzania a long way behind its East African neighbours, Kenya and Uganda, which enrol four times and twice as many students respectively. In fact, the UNICEF report claims that "of all countries for which records are available, Tanzania has the lowest rate of secondary education in the world." Far more so than in primary education, parents are sending their children to private secondary schools - estimated at 43 percent - but analysts say that for Tanzania to meet the Ministry of Education and Culture's "very feasible" targets of a net enrolment rate of 50 percent by 2010, there will have to be a rapid development of the Secondary Education Development Plan in the public domain. Adapting higher education During the recent launch of a World Bank study on the importance of tertiary education for development, it was revealed that Tanzania's higher education is not faring a great deal better. "The number of students admitted to the university of Dar es Salaam is 30 percent of the applicants that actually qualify - that's to say 70 percent of the successful applicants have to be rejected," Professor Matthew Luhanga, the University's vice-chancellor, declared at the launch. Luhanga said that it was down to a matter of limited resources and, as a result, the university was coming up with ways of diversifying. "We are beginning to promote distance education through the use of V-Sat technology so that students can combine distance and residential learning," he told reporters. "Also, we are looking forward to new partnerships and projects. Resolute, a multi-national gold mining company, has promised to turn its gold mine into a university campus at the end of mining. To adapt to the knowledge generation, we are also developing courses that specialise in mining and tourism, which are two of Tanzania's biggest industries." These ideas were welcomed by the author of the World Bank report, which recommends partnerships with international companies and increasingly flexible study programmes that take advantage of new information and communication technologies, as well as increased donor funding for tertiary education as a way of bridging the knowledge gap. "More than ever, tertiary education drives a country's future, and in today's world, it can make the difference between a dynamic economy and a marginalized one," Jamil Salmi, the lead author and a Higher Education Specialist at the World Bank, said. "As a result, tertiary education must play a key role within a country's general education agenda, even where a country may be struggling to provide its children and teenagers with a primary or secondary schooling. To focus exclusively on basic education would effectively doom a country's efforts to secure an eventually prosperous toehold in a global economy which has little need for learning by rote or simply recycling facts," he concluded.