Turning stones in Tanzania

How we changed our approach to finding impactful local partners to realise our Education Strategy

While revising our education strategy in 2021, we took on a more proactive approach putting more effort than before into identifying priority countries and new partnership opportunities.??

Doing country reviews allows us to identify the country context, the state of education, government priorities and main challenges, as well as relevant actors and initiatives in the country.??

Last year we decided to investigate opportunities in Tanzania, a country that is challenged providing quality and accessible basic education. And apart from being highly enlightening it enabled us to materialise our education strategy into two new and exciting projects in Tanzania with partners we most likely wouldn’t have reached under normal circumstances.??

State of Tanzania?

Tanzania has 58 million inhabitants of which 45 per cent are under 15 years old (Statista 2022). While Tanzania has been politically stable for many years and growing economically, according to Danida, the country still is one of the world’s poorest, with almost 90 per cent of the population living on less than 2 USD per day.??

Within the last decades, the Tanzanian government has put a strong focus on education. Thereby, big improvements concerning school access for children have been achieved. Tanzania is now one of the few low-income countries that are close to achieving the goal of securing primary school education for all children. In 2016, the government implemented compulsory primary school education, while making these years of schooling free of charge.?

In 2020, almost 97per cent of eligible children in Tanzania were enrolled in primary school (World Bank, Sep. 2021). This upward development has created a need for additional resources in the education system due to a lack of teachers, education material and school facilities. Even though the government already works with bi- and multilateral donors to secure access to quality education, this support does not cover the most essential needs.?

Major challenges in the Tanzanian school system?

There are four major challenges the Tanzanian education system is facing now:?

• As a result of so many children starting school, there are too many students in the classroom with an average student/teacher-ratio of 131:1?
• There is a lack of educated teachers, especially in rural areas because it is more difficult to motivate them due to a lack of resources and high levels of poverty?
• A lack of training and information leads to teachers’ and principals’ unwillingness to implement the government’s education reforms??
• Only 8% of 2nd-grade students can read at the level required for their age?

Therefore, we decided to work with two new partners in Tanzania to achieve impact at scale.?

E-learning with Ubongo?

Ubongo specialises on high-quality, localised edutainment for children to bridge the digital divide and combat learning poverty in rural Tanzania. In our 2-year partnership we want to directly reach 9,000 communities in Tanzania by ensuring access to e-learning content. See more about the project and our partnership in the LinkedIn posting here .?

Teacher incentives with Twaweza?

We are also supporting Twaweza in a 2-year-partnership to implement their teacher incentives program for early grade teachers. It aims to improve children’s foundational literacy and numeracy skills in public primary schools in Tanzania. Read more about it here .

New prospects for our work on education?

With this new and strong basis for identifying partnerships, we can work towards our strategic goals and contribute to combatting learning poverty.?

We have already decided to repeat the process – only this time in Uganda. Soon we will share the results of our country review for Uganda and announce our new partnership.??