What is the situation in primary education forty years after independence? We now have the
Primary Education Development Plan (PEDP), which is very good news. After two decades of
decline and neglect, finally something is happening!
During the 1970s Tanzania made impressive gains in expanding universal primary education.
In 1980 gross enrollment rates reached 100%. The objective of everyone enjoying free
primary schooling was in clear sight. Mwalimu Nyerere became well known throughout the
world for his commitment to education that would liberate his people from poverty.
But the situation turned sharply in the opposite direction starting in the early 1980s.
Economic crises resulting from the war with Uganda, declining commodity prices as oil prices
went up, mismanagement of the local economy and breakdown of relations with the Bretton
Woods institutions starved the Government of revenues and distracted its attention. Key
tenets of socialist policies, such as the provision of free education, were eroded with the
introduction of ‘cost sharing’.
By 2000, gross enrollment had plummeted to 77%. Cohort studies showed that less than half
of all Tanzanian children were completing primary education, with the poor being the most
excluded. The quality of education, never too good in the first place, deteriorated further to
one of the lowest levels in the world. Efforts to reform education seemed only to produce
mountains of papers written by technical consultants with no real difference on the ground.