Experience Of Tanzania Research Articles

Realities of documenting wildlife corridors in tropical countries

Connectivity is regarded as vital in conservation planning but the whereabouts of remaining wildlife corridors and dispersal areas in most tropical countries are poorly documented. With local experts, we compiled an annotated list of the most important wildlife corridors remaining on mainland Tanzania, information on the status of each corridor, wildlife using these corridors, and threats to them. We discovered that the concept of a wildlife corridor differs greatly between different people working in the same country, so we divided these into five working categories. The most common categories were those identified by known movements of animals between two protected areas, or simply proposed connections between important habitats. In Tanzania, the majority of documented corridors now seem to be in a critical condition, that is, they may have less than 5 years remaining before they disappear, judging by current rates of land use change. Five corridors are in extreme condition and could disappear within 2 years unless immediate action is taken. These pressing problems – and our experience in Tanzania – indicate that surveys of remaining wildlife corridors may need urgent documentation in other countries too and that collators should maintain loose definitions of corridors, accept data of variable quality and give information to authorities as soon as possible in order to maximize the chances of saving these conservation assets.

Standards to assure quality in tertiary education: the case of Tanzania

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide information on development of standards in Tanzania which may be of help to training providers in other countries as they seek to improve the quality and standards of their provision.Design/methodology/approachThe need to provide quality assured tertiary qualifications in Tanzania to win both national and international recognition is explained. Processes of registration of institutions capable of delivering training programmes adequately and accreditation of the same to offer awards at appropriate levels as a means to ensure quality of provision are explored. Standards of good practice in Tanzanian tertiary education are surveyed and the challenges to their achievement are discussed based on the author's direct experience in Tanzania. Relevant and recent literatures on the topic are surveyed and some lessons drawn.FindingsAccreditation standards are useful in instilling best practices in education and training. However, education and training institutions need to understand and practice them over a period of time to bring about expected results. It is concluded that ensuring quality in education is a multifaceted phenomenon that calls for the joint efforts of all key stakeholders.Originality/valueThe paper illustrates that the National Council for Technical Education is one of the first regulatory bodies in Africa to introduce academic quality standards in tertiary technical institutions. Notable improvements have been recorded since its inception. The experience described is the paper is not very common, so other countries taking similar steps may find it useful.

Going to scale with Participatory Forest Management: early lessons from Tanzania

SUMMARY The paper provides an overview of experiences in Tanzania to date in ‘scaling up’ Participatory Forest Management (PFM) from what has until recently been a ‘project-driven’ approach to one that is mainstreamed and embedded within national and local government institutions. It highlights the valuable role that projects have played in influencing policy, developing new models and tools, but also some of the pitfalls of the project approach, particularly with regard to local expectations, the lack of sustainability and failure to integrate within local institutions and systems. In addition, the paper assesses the degree to which different models of Participatory Forest Management (PFM) have delivered on their two main policy objectives — sustainable forest management and improved rural livelihoods. The paper outlines some of the enabling factors as well as constraints to further dissemination and scaling-up of PFM in Tanzania — looking at political, institutional, social and economic dimensions.

User needs assessment for implementing the TSA in Tanzania

The recently approved Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) provides opportunities for countries around the world to improve the quality of their respective tourism statistics and make them compatible with international standards. This paper describes how clarity of user needs assessment can identify implementation priorities and scope of the TSA. Given the elaborate conceptual design of the TSA, prioritizing parts of its implementation will be a realistic process and will also ensure maximum utility of its output for potential user groups. Results of this study are based on evidence from Tanzania's experience of developing a TSA.

Creating an "enabling environment" for taking insecticide treated nets to national scale: the Tanzanian experience.

IntroductionMalaria is the largest cause of health services attendance, hospital admissions and child deaths in Tanzania. At the Abuja Summit in April 2000 Tanzania committed itself to protect 60% of its population at high risk of malaria by 2005. The country is, therefore, determined to ensure that sustainable malaria control using insecticide-treated nets is carried out on a national scale.Case descriptionTanzania has been involved for two decades in the research process for developing insecticide-treated nets as a malaria control tool, from testing insecticides and net types, to assessing their efficacy and effectiveness, and exploring new ways of distribution. Since 2000, the emphasis has changed from a project approach to that of a concerted multi-stakeholder action for taking insecticide-treated nets to national scale (NATNETS). This means creating conditions that make insecticide-treated nets accessible and affordable to all those at risk of malaria in the country. This paper describes Tanzania's experience in (1) creating an enabling environment for insecticide-treated nets scale-up, (2) promoting the development of a commercial sector for insecticide-treated nets, and (3) targeting pregnant women with highly subsidized insecticide-treated nets through a national voucher scheme. As a result, nearly 2 million insecticide-treated nets and 2.2 million re-treatment kits were distributed in 2004.ConclusionNational upscaling of insecticide-treated nets is possible when the programme is well designed, coordinated and supported by committed stakeholders; the Abuja target of protecting 60% of those at high risk is feasible, even for large endemic countries.

Colonialism and Beyond: Gender and Culture in Recent Histories of Tanzania, Ghana, and Lesotho

Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian."I Will Not Eat Stone": A Women's History of Colonial Asante. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000. xxi +255 pp. ISBN 0-85255-691-8 (cl). Marc Epprecht. 'This matter of women is getting very bad' Gender, Development, and Politics in Colonial Lesotho. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000. vi +281 pp. ISBN 0-86980-953-9 (pb). Dorothy L. Hodgson. Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ix + 333 pp. ISBN 0-253-33909-X (cl). Each of the books reviewed for this essay addresses ways in which African identities were negotiated during the colonial period in sub-Saharan Africa. Two of the books are explicitly interested in African women's experiences of and responses to social, economic, and political transformations in the first part of the twentieth century. Marc Epprecht's study of Basotho women during the late colonial period, 'This matter of women is getting very bad': Gender, Development and Politics in Colonial Lesotho, highlights the centrality of gender to colonial strategies for labor procurement, development, and nationalist politics in Basutoland/Lesotho, and also the responses of Basotho women to their rapidly changing circumstances. Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian's volume, "I Will Not Eat Stone": A Women's History of Colonial Asante, explores the lives of Asante women born into the first colonized generation during the first two decades of the twentieth century. They view the dramatic changes wrought by cocoa production, together with colonial authority and missionary influence, through the lens of African women's experiences, particularly in the context of conjugal relations. The third book, Dorothy Hodgson's, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development, casts the net more broadly to consider the ways in which Maasai cultural and gender identity have been continually negotiated in relation to colonial and postcolonial development interventions in Tanzania. Each book draws on a combination of archival research and interviews. In addition, Hodgson's and Epprecht's work is enriched by the authors' [End Page 213] work experiences in Tanzania and Lesotho, respectively. The results of the all of the authors' extensive field experience come through as the works never lose sight of the agency of those who are struggling to define their identities and livelihoods. Each of these books makes significant contributions to African history by recovering the voices and experiences of those left out of more conventional histories that focus on colonial perceptions, state policies, and the experiences of dominant groups. But, in different ways and to different degrees, these volumes go well beyond correcting the androcentric tendencies of official histories by situating their subjects within much broader discourses on modernization, progress, and development that should draw the attention of scholars beyond African history. At the heart of each of these works is the question of how African men and women lived their lives during the colonial period and beyond. One of the strengths of these volumes is that they illuminate the details and nuances of gendered identities in three different historical and spatial locations. Nevertheless, one cannot help but be struck by the similarities that emerge from women's experiences of colonialism and development. In their concluding chapter Allman and Tashjian write, "when one aims the historical spotlight on commoner women, on work obligations, on the shifting burdens of social reproduction, one cannot help but be struck by the commonalities in experiences" (223). In circumstances characterized by marked differences in labor practices, agricultural systems, lineage, and forms of colonialism African women experienced declining status, increasing work burdens, disappearing safety nets and increasing responsibility for household reproduction. This statement will ring true for anyone who is familiar with the growing field of historiography on African women during the colonial period. And while all of these volumes do, indeed, illustrate a tale of...

Competition and Coordination in Liberalized African Cotton Market Systems

Private operators now dominate input supply, crop buying and ginning activities in many African cotton sectors. Varying levels of competition are observed, but greater levels of competition are not necessarily associated with better system performance. This paper explores this phenomenon, drawing on the liberalization experience of Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. While the capacity of the state to support markets remains weak, there may be tradeoffs between the level of competition and the degree of coordination achieved between players within a sector. Different sectoral structures are observed, with a different role for the state appropriate for each.

Editor's Choice

The observation that babies with Down's syndrome have flatter noses than their normal siblings led a few years ago to attempts to use nasal bone visualisation in early pregnancy to screen for Down's pregnancy. Not surprisingly it was soon suggested that, since nasal prominence also varies by race, the likelihood ratio of nasal bone absence might need to be adjusted for the parents' ethnic origin. On page 109–112 Basky Thilanagathan and his colleagues at St George's hospital in London demonstrate that this supposition is correct. It may not be long before Down's screeners go the next step and adjust the risk for the individual parent's nose size. BJOG occasionally publishes trials which have failed to meet their recruitment targets, and we have one this month (p. 148–153). David Grimes and his colleagues from Chapel Hill, North Carolina wanted to compare medical and surgical methods for mid-trimester pregnancy termination. Their first step was to enrol 60 women in a pilot study, in order to estimate recruitment to a definitive trial. However, after one year they had recruited only 18 women, and decided to stop. Even this number is still worth reporting. It has taught us that most women who declined to participate preferred a surgical procedure. This should give UK doctors pause for thought since dilatation and evacuation is often unavailable here. There was also a slight trend to more pain and minor complications in those allocated to the medical procedure. Not surprisingly most women were satisfied with either method and, as so often in trials, whatever method they were allocated most would choose the same one in future. These data will inform other trial protocols, and may be included in future systematic reviews. BJOG publishes relatively little basic science for the simple reason that we are primarily a clinical journal and most of our readers are clinicians. However, we are always interested in developments that are still some way from clinical application. Åkerlund and colleagues' demonstration (p. 120–124) that a newly synthesised compound, ONO-8815Ly, inhibits uterine contractions in vivo in non-pregnant volunteers may not immediately grab all our readers attention. However, the compound was synthesised specifically to act as an endoperoxidase-2 (EP-2) receptor agonist, since these are believed to cause uterine relaxation. It is plausible that after further testing it may have a role in treatment of preterm labour or dysmenorrhoea. Last September we published two papers from Helena Strevens and her colleagues from Lund in Sweden in which the researchers had performed renal biopsies on women with pre-eclampsia, as well as on some normal pregnant women. This has provoked a lively correspondence from experts who believe both that the original trial was unethical and that BJOG should have refused to publish the results, and a vigorous defence from the original researchers (p 193–195). We have probably not heard the last of the topic. Most experts accept that variations in maternal mortality ratios between more and less developed countries are related to the quality of maternal care. It is less clear whether variation within developed countries can be attributed to the same cause. This matters because there is a nearly twofold difference in maternal mortality ratio across the countries of Europe, and it would be important to know whether this can be altered by improvements in maternity care. The paper by the late Katherine Wildman and her colleagues in the MOMS group (p 164–169) suggests that even at the low mortality ratios seen in Europe the quality of care is important. This will help people prevent women dying and encourage us all to evaluate different health care delivery systems. Tragically, Katherine Wildman died suddenly in November 2003. She suffered anaphylactic shock after eating snails. Katherine was aged only 35 and was one of the most promising young public health physicians working on Maternal and Child health. She had experience in Tanzania and had worked at INSERM in Paris since 2001. This important paper is a fitting memorial.

Cultural interpretations of an emerging health problem: blood pressure in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

This paper examines how a lower middle class community in an urban quarter of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania experiences the relatively new health problem of high blood pressure. Unlike previous research that focused on cultural risk factors or attempted to extract cultural models of hypertension, our study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines illness experience as a representation or embodiment of social suffering. The participants in this study use the local expressions ‘BP’ or ‘presha’ (from blood pressure) to refer to an illness that overlaps but is not synonymous with the biomedical conception of hypertension. The local concepts draw on biomedical notions of hypertension and, in addition, incorporate a range of afflictions into the symptomatology and aetiology that mirror their experiences of an increasingly harsh urban life. The concept of ‘BP’, therefore, is not bound to the body in a medical sense. As a broader and more complex syndrome, ‘BP’ is a somatic expression of emotional distress that links the body with the lived experience in this urban setting. Our approach of analysing cultural interpretations of ‘BP’ as an emerging health problem in this particular urban context calls for a more comprehensive response in diagnosis and treatment.

Better infection than hunger’. A study of illness perceptions with special focus on urinary schistosomiasis in Northern Tanzania

This paper is about how a community in Northern Tanzania experiences and reasons around urinary schistosomiasis and more specifically female genital schistosomiasis or schistosomiasis of the reproductive tract. As a disease, female genital schistosomiasis presents itself with a variety of symptoms which neither the affected woman nor the medical professionals usually recognise as schistosomiasis. The study therefore focused on symptom recognition, the question being whether women living in an endemic area can distinguish symptoms of urinary and genital schistosomiasis from those of other diseases presenting in similar ways. Data were generated using a combination of qualitative methods including observation, individual interviews and focus group discussions with diverse categories of people. All the research participants were aware of the link between water and infection. Because the disease is associated with farming, the main livelihood, there was a strong feeling among the research participants that treatment, whether in hospital or by traditional medicine could not effect permanent cure. Re-infection was considered inevitable and as schistosomiasis was said to be less poisonous than malaria, it was felt there was little choice between being infected and having food. Making sense of the symptoms was considered moreover difficult although women and men said they could tell whether blood in urine was due to urinary schistosomiasis or other conditions such as sexually transmitted diseases which present similar symptoms. The similarity of symptoms was said to be problematic also because of the sensitivity and stigma in sexually transmitted diseases. Urinary schistosomiasis is therefore a complex health problem and for any effective control there is clearly a need to grasp this complexity.

Strengthening Rapid Assessments in Urban Areas: Lessons from Bangladesh and Tanzania

Understanding urban issues is extremely important for programming especially for organizations that have traditionally focused on assisting poor households and communities in rural area. Development organizations and governments frequently use rapid assessment methods because they have limited resources and little time to devote to longer-term more complex research projects. Generally these methods employ qualitative techniques to solicit information from relatively small numbers of people in a short time. Researchers have raised questions about the reliability of these methods and policy makers and other development practitioners the primary audience for the findings if they are to have impact sometimes doubt the validity of findings. This paper holds up CAREs experiences with rapid assessments in Bangladesh and Tanzania to widely accepted criteria for sound social science research: basically whether feasible and ethical methods can generate accurate valid and reliable results that others such as programmers and policy makers will find useful. Experiences in Bangladesh and Tanzania suggest that the principal challenges to the validity of rapid assessments in urban areas can be met through use of representative samples; integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches; incorporation of team members with a variety of perspectives knowledge areas and professions; and linkages with local organizations and community members who are familiar with the economic political social and cultural context of the city. (authors)

Poverty, HIV, and barriers to education: Street children's experiences in Tanzania

This article discusses the links between poverty, HIV/AIDS, and barriers to education, based on the first-hand experiences of 'street children' in northern Tanzania. Within the context of national levels of poverty, 'cost-sharing' in health and education sectors, and the AIDS epidemic, poor families in Tanzania are under considerable pressure, and increasing numbers of girls and boys are consequently seeking a living independently on the streets of towns and cities. My research with street children shows that some children orphaned by AIDS are subject to rejection and exploitation by the extended family after the death of their parent(s). They are exposed to considerable risks of abuse, sexual violence and HIV within the street environment. Here, I discuss the links between poverty, HIV and barriers to education, which compound young people's vulnerability, and offer some policy recommendations in response to the young people's experiences.

Expansion of Private Secondary Education: Lessons from Recent Experience in Tanzania

The private sector's role in education has been the subject of much analysis and policy debate in recent years. In developing countries, public resources for education are limited and governments have traditionnally relied on private education, particularly at the post-basic levels, to meet the excess demand for education. Even when excess demand is not a major issue, advocates of private education note that private schools can be more efficient than their public sector counterparts, delivering more value in terms of student achievement per investment of resources. In this article we explore Tanzania's experience with private education during the early 1990s, a period of rapid educational expansion stimulated by new governement policies put in place in the mid- to late 1980s. We compare public and private secondary schools in terms of student achievement, as well as in terms of how they are organized and run. Taking advantage of the availability of a unique set of longitudinal data, we also examine the impact of rapide private sector growth on overall sector development, student learning, competition among schools for staff resources, and changes in student enrollments at the school level.

Growth and Structure of Tanzania's Industrial Sector Investment and Employment.

Tanzania like many other Sub-Saharan African countries is facing a formidable challenge of creating many employment opportunities so as to be able to absorb, each year, about 700,000 new entrants going into the job market or about 200,000 individuals who seek wage employment every year. Industrialization is one of the ways which can help in dealing with this problem. Indeed the experiences of South-East Asian countries show that industrial growth can contribute to the creation of employment opportunities in a sustainable manner. Tanzania's experience, however, show that the relatively high output growth achieved during reforms since the mid 1980s have not resulted into such increased employment creation. This situation is probably a reflection of the fact that the growth momentum achieved in Tanzania is either inadequate or does not come from investment directed into the labour intensive activities. This paper asserts that in order for the industrial sector to contribute substantially and in a sustainable manner to employment creation in Tanzania then, first the rate of industrial investment must be increased and secondly the pattern of industrial investment must be directed to labour intensive and agro-based industrial activities. Tanzania being basically an agricultural country such investment will have a multiplier effect in terms of employment generation partly due to the linkages effects which such industries might have to the rest of the economy. African Journal of Finance and Management Vol.8(2) 2000: 46-54

The Impact of Financial Liberalization: Interest Rates and Lending Behaviour 1984 - 1997 Experience of Tanzania.

The experience with financial liberalization is rather mixed. There are success stories and there are cases of failure. However financial sector liberalization school predicts improved performance if there is right sequencing of the reform programme. Increased savings following from increased positive interest rates, increased efficiency in the allocation of credit and financial integration in the economy are some of the expected outcomes. Tanzanian experience and that of other countries show that the expectations about financial sector liberalization are not attainable even where there is the right sequencing of the reform process. In particular capital rationing under financial sector liberalization is not explained by this school. This paper studies the Tanzanian experience in light of the experiences form other countries and finds out that the expected results on interest rates and lending behaviour are not as predicted. These contradictory outcomes are explained using the new institutional school. The timing and sequencing of the reform programme is also analyzed to check whether it might have influenced the results. African Journal of Finance and Management Vol.9(1) 2000: 31-42

Integrating oral health into primary health care - experiences in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal and Tanzania

When primary health care (PHC) was developed and implemented in developing countries, oral health was not included. The present consequences are marked disparities in the distribution of oral health care, since conventional dentistry can only serve relatively few people and at high costs. Oral health care is virtually non-existent in rural areas of most developing countries where more than 80 per cent of the population live. More recently, community based oral health programmes have been initiated in some countries to fill the gap. These programmes give more emphasis on oral health promotion and on the prevention of oral diseases than on treatment of its consequences, since history has shown that the latter is ineffective in preventing oral diseases. Unfortunately, most of these oral health programmes have been implemented next to the existing PHC system and hence they face enormous management, logistic and financial problems, which seriously threaten their sustainability. This paper presents a proposal to counteract the problems that many countries face in developing an adequate primary oral health care (POHC) service.

Inter-annual variability of short rains over northern Tanzania

The structure and variability of inter-annual circulation anomalies and precursors over northern Tanzania are investigated. Northern Tanzania experiences bimodal rains centered on: March to May ('long' rains) and October to December ('short' rains), our focus here. Areal rainfall departures in the period 1960 to 1990 are used to identify wet and dry years. Composite fields of sea surface tem- perature (SST), outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and winds in the lower and upper troposphere are analysed at lags 0, -2, -4 and -6 mo. The historical mean is subtracted to produce anomalies. The pat- terns indicate an east-west gradient in SST anomalies across the Indian Ocean which corresponds with a zonal circulation and enhanced convection over the western basin, and increased rainfall over north- ern Tanzania. A multiple regression model is developed using 3 tropical predictors in the July to Sep- tember period. The model accounts for about half of short-rain rainfall variance in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Success of Newly Privatized Companies: New Evidence from Tanzania

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the benefits of privatization; however, in countries with low per capita incomes and with slow or no growth recently, most local residents do not have the capital or expertise needed to acquire parastatals. Who then is buying enterprises formerly owned by government? This pilot study of a sample of agro-industrial enterprises in Tanzania gives some insight into the purchasers and managers of newly privatized firms, the estimated economic viability of these firms, and the problems and level of investment associated with the privatization process. The firms, which had been privatized for at least three years, were located in the Dar es Salaam-Morogoro region of the country. The study also reveals information on the government's progress in privatization, a government that had a strong carry-over of socialist indoctrination and that is struggling with changes in commercial laws to allow competition to flourish at the same time it is encouraging privatization. Tanzania's experience is compared with that of other sub-Saharan African countries. Conclusions appear to apply more widely than the pilot sample chosen.

BOD5 removal in facultative ponds: experience in Tanzania

This paper discusses the removal of BOD5 in facultative ponds under tropical conditions. Data was collected from pilot and field ponds at the University of Dar es Salaam and was compared to other ponds in Dar es Salaam. Results showed deviations of performance, in some cases, from assumptions made during the design. The permissible organic loading rate for ponds in Dar es Salaam was 450 kg BOD5/ha/d. To reduce concentration of algae in the final effluent, a sunken outlet structure was suggested.

BOD5 removal in facultative ponds: Experience in Tanzania

This paper discusses the removal of BOD5 in facultative ponds under tropical conditions. Data was collected from pilot and field ponds at the University of Dar es Salaam and was compared to other ponds in Dar es Salaam. Results showed deviations of performance, in some cases, from assumptions made during the design. The permissible organic loading rate for ponds in Dar es Salaam was 450 kg BOD5/ha/d. To reduce concentration of algae in the final effluent, a sunken outlet structure was suggested.