Background of education in Tanzania

 Background of education in Tanzania

The Tanzanian education system would not have existed without a mention of both colonial German and British education systems.prior to the Germans and British education systems ,It is documented that formal western schooling began in around 1868 by missionaries of different denominations. Before the missionaries, an informal tribal education.

       Education reform is the name given to the goals of changing public education  .Historically reforms have taken different forms because the motivation of reforms have been differed .

Hence,After its  independence from great Britain's Tanzania had only two (2) engineers and twelve (12) doctors ; Adult literacy rate was hovening around 17% faced with this reality ,the country decided to take radical changes to reforms it's education sector through policy changes in 1967 the country adopted the self reliance education policy.

The major education reforms in 1970s in Tanzania are as follows;-

1: Universal primary education (UPE)

This means that president nyerere's key object of this development strategy as reflected in the Arusha declaration was to ensure basic colonial services were distributed equitably in the country .as part of arusha declaration,education was key to achieving this key goal of the country development strategy, Thus universal primary education (UPE) of 1974 became not just a slogan but a movement in it's own rights.The goal for UPE was to make primary education accessible to all Tanzanian children. UPE implementation was the largest scale increases in the number of primary schools and teachers ever recorded  .In the beginning of the 1980s Tanzania had achieved it's goal of having a primary school  in each village and the total enrollment of primary age children rose to 100%. However the high increase in enrollment and teacher hires accumulatively increased the Manning cost through the roughs and quality of education started to suffer.

 2: The highs and the lows of the 1980s .

In the early and mid of 1980s Tanzania suffered heavily from economic decline in trade, economic growth and stagnant tax revenue base .At the same time donor countries who supported the earlier expansion of schools in the whole country by providing capital was started to withdraw their support .Thus the entire running cost for all the schools fell on the governmenments shoulders .The government had a very small tax Base at the time was around 3%.these problems together added significant tension to the Government offers which resulted in significant decline in most social services including education.Books ,school supplies and even paying teachers salaries was increasingly becoming harder for the government. The costs were insurmountable. As a result of education out comes deteriorated as well. In the years of 1990s enrollment in primary schools declined from 100% of the early 1980s to 82% in the year 1992 . At the same time literacy rate increased from 10% in 1982 to 16% in 1992.

  3: The cost sharing policy

The decline in resources to run the schools and the pressure from international financial institutions forced the government to gradually introduced a cost sharing model to run it's schools efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately the number and the amount of contributions increased progressively from the laws in the 1980s to the highs in the mid 1990s .Because of the increase in cost a decline in quality and perhaps a declining return of investment in education resulted to significances decline in schools enrollment.

 4: The basic education master plan (BEMP)

As the country continued to face the challenges in it's education master more policy changes has to take place to mitigate the problems in 1997,Tanzania developed the basic education master plan policy (BEMP) to ensure growth and equatable access to high quality formal education and adult literacy through facility expansion, efficiency gains and quality improvement in implementing ,this policy less developed districts and regions were given priority and preference in opening up new secondary schools or by receiving government assistance to do just that.

  5: Reforms through participative approach .

Further reforms comes through the elimination of using fees through participative approach .The process of leading to the elimination of user fees on primary education in Tanzania was a result of ,as one interviewee put it .'the coming together of many streams to a river'  .These streams were increasing social discontent, the PRSP process, civil society organizations activism in Tanzania as well as in north and the turn_around of the Tanzanian government and the donors community in support of the measure.

Generally Tanzania experiences in education sector has a number of lessons to offer based on the following ,very low level of education participation inherited at independence (1961) followed by massive enrollment increases in the 1970s (UPE), decline through the 1980s and 1990s ( enrollment finding political or program focus) reaching crisis point and consensus that education was priority one ( HIPC /PRPS) and civil society pressure in Tanzania or inter nationally.

By concluding that, The education reforms in Tanzania were basically stakeholders driven.Thus the real lesson learnt from the reforms in education should not be seen as government principal role  .

  References

1:  Arvidsons A.and Novdstrom,M.(2006). EDUCATION SECTOR POLICY OVERVIEW PAPER

 2: Jansen,D.(2002).equal educational opportunities;cooperative perspective i