Rebecca Utiger
Education is a powerful instrument to sustainably reduce poverty. Better Education is correlated to reduced fertility, greater agricultural productivity, and overall economic growth. Individuals with higher levels of education tend to have better physical and mental health, even when considered their income, class, and ethnicity. Nevertheless, the example of Tanzania shows that only getting children into school is not sufficient to sustainably reduce poverty.
Good quality education should reach everyone https://www.globalpartnership.org
Nationwide Primary Education
In this article I will discuss what impacts the first introduction of Universal Primary Education UPE had in Tanzania and why its potential could not be fully exploited. UPE is the second goal in the United Nations Millennium Development Goal. It ensures the enrolment of all school-age children in primary school. Tanzania came close to achieving UPE from 1977 to 1978 (Galabawa, 2001), but by the end of the millennium the enrolments decreased drastically. The government set a new goal to achieve UPE by 2015. In consequence there were investments in the social sectors of education and health. And indeed, the net enrolment ratio in primary school increased from 88.5 % in 2003 to 97.3 % in 2007 (Maliti, 2016).
Quantity and quality
However, increased enrolment in primary education does not necessarily increase competence in the subjects taught in school. A study from Bossiere et al. (Boissiere, Knight, & Sabot, 1985) showed that it is not the years that you spend in school but what you in fact learn during those years that determines the success of your futur career. Learning outcomes such as literacy, numeracy and life skills decide about our future professional performance (Wedgwood, 2007).
When Tanzania increased substantially its enrolments in primary schools the transformation stumbled across the infrastructure that was unprepared for the rapid changes. With many more children in school from one day to the next, a lot of things lacked. There were not enough classrooms, furniture, and textbooks. But more importantly there were not enough qualified teachers to sustain good quality lessons. To fill in the blank, untrained teachers were appointed. This led to the situation that many teachers had a low level of competence. The secondary and higher education were not included in the expansion because primary education was said to be more cost-effective. This meant that not enough people could be trained to attend the new posts as teachers. Even now there are not enough graduates from secondary school with good grades who would be qualified for teaching. Also, the teacher pupil ratio had an average of 59:1 in 2004, in some areas even up to 74:1 (Wedgwood, 2007).
The collectivity of overcrowded classrooms, irregular teachers’ attendance, lack of teaching materials and inadaptability of teaching methods made it impossible to provide a positive learning experience for children. Tanzanian writers, for example Leshabari and Masesa, say that forcing the UPE was the main reason why the quality of primary education in Tanzania declined. UPE therefore led to low quality education rather than universalization. In Tanzania there even exists the term “Ualimu Pasipo Elimu” (UPE) which means teaching without education (Wedgwood, 2007).
Sustainability
It appears that the implementation of UPE was not a sustainable process. The increased participation was at the expense of quality education and gave few returns in terms of human development and Sustainable Development Goals SDG (Wedgwood, 2007). But why was it thus implemented?
One reason is found in the election process. While the benefits of expanded access can be seen almost immediately, benefits of the investment in quality take much longer to show. Therefore, the quality improvements don’t come into effect in time for the completion of the next electoral term (Wedgwood, 2007). However, there are possible benefits for those who had education years after the first reform after several adjustments in the course of action were made. The next generations can profit from the improved educational access once the system has learned to cope with increased participation (Sabates, Westbrook, & Hernandez-Fernandez, 2012).
Rising inequality
UPE was implemented to ensure access to education for everyone. Primary school fees were dropped in 2001 (Maliti, 2019). But wealth inequality between gender, and between rural and urban areas are still a huge problem. The poorest families are three times less likely to attend school than the wealthiest. The most vulnerable to dropping out of school or never going to school at all are girls, the poorest children, children with disabilities and children in underserved communities (Unicef, 2022). In 2005, the drop out ratio in Tanzania was much higher for girls than for boys (Wedgwood, 2007).
The differences in quality between rural and urban areas were profound. In urban areas the lack of teaching material could be financed by wealthy parents and the teachers could be given higher pay. Also, some teachers held poor lessons to later provide private tuition. This meant that even though education was theoretically accessible many were excluded of the benefits (Wedgwood, 2007).
One possibility to measure a benefit from education is to determine the fertility rate. In comparable countries the fertility rate dropped with increased education. However, this was not the case for Tanzania. Data from 1999 shows that women with primary education only had slightly fewer children than those without. A much larger difference is shown in the comparison of rural and urban areas. This suggests that urbanization is the main effect of the reduced fertility of Tanzania (Wedgwood, 2007).
What could have been done?
Author Ruth Wedgwood provides advice on how to improve the quality of education facing the difficulties described above. She is of the opinion that expansion should only be made when quality can be preserved. This means that when progress is slow, there are fewer side effects which enables it to be more sustainable. So prioritizing quality over quantity plays a major part in her critics. She also suggests that rural areas should be prioritized because they are clearly disadvantaged (Wedgwood, 2005). Emmanuel Maliti recommends that teachers should not only be well trained but also supported and motivated. Students and parents should also be considered as players that have an interest in the outcomes (Maliti, 2016).
The case of Tanzania shows that substantially increasing the enrolment ratio for primary school without accurately planning on how the higher ratio should be attended leads to diverse problems. The outcome is that more people get an education which is of such poor quality that in the end no one really profits.
Transformations of this wide influence for a country are a huge project which addresses many Sustainable Development Goals SDGs. In this case it is mainly goal number 4 Quality Education but indirectly Gender Equality (5), Reduced Inequalities (10) and No Poverty (1) are also addressed. The example also shows that if a change is implemented it can lead to negative effects. Which was the case for the educational system in Tanzania.
Bibliography
Boissiere, M., Knight, J. B., & Sabot, R. H. (1985). Earnings, Schooling, Ability , and Cognitive Skills. 75(5), 1016–1030. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1818642
Galabawa, J. C. J. (2001). Reaching Out, Reaching All— Sustaining Effective Policy and Practice for Education in Africa Developments and Issues Regarding Universal Primary Education (UPE) in Tanzania DOC A. ADEA Biennial Meeting, 2001.
Maliti, E. (2016). A 20-year perspective.
Maliti, E. (2019). Inequality in Education and Wealth in Tanzania: A 25-Year Perspective. Social Indicators Research, 145(3), 901–921. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1838-y
Sabates, R., Westbrook, J., & Hernandez-Fernandez, J. (2012). The 1977 Universal Primary Education in Tanzania: A historical base for quantitative enquiry. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 35(1), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2011.609551
Unicef. (2022). Unicef Education.
Wedgwood, R. (2005). Post-Basic Education and Poverty in Tanzania. Post-Basic Education and Training, (July), 1–56.
Wedgwood, R. (2007). Education and poverty reduction in Tanzania. International Journal of Educational Development, 27(4), 383–396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2006.10.005
Figure 1: https://www.globalpartnership.org, consulted 03/03/2022