Tanzania has seen a remarkable increase in primary enrollments since the inception
of the Primary Education Development Program (PEDP) in 2001, which led
to the abolishment of school fees in early 2002. However, large regional variation
is found in gross and net enrollment rates (NER), which indicates that not all
regions have benefited equally from the PEDP. Moreover, in comparing enrollment
rates estimated from representative household surveys with administrative
data from the Education Management Information System (EMIS), we see that
the EMIS significantly overestimates net enrollment rates (by almost 16 percentage
points) and to a lesser extent gross enrollment rates (by almost 7 percentage
points). In 2010 about half of the discrepancy in net enrollment rates can be
attributed to inaccurate reporting of the age of students in the EMIS, and the
other half is related to the EMIS using population projections that underestimate
the primary school-age population. Both issues deserve urgent attention from
policy makers because they heavily affect the notion of whether key government
targets are being achieved or not.
Children from poor families have increased their share of overall primary
enrollments in recent years but continue to be disadvantaged. Children from the
poorest quintile have an eight times higher probability not to go to school
between the ages of 10 and 13 compared with children from the wealthiest
quintile. When they do go, they are more likely to visit schools of lower quality
(i.e., schools with high student-teacher ratios).
Encouragingly, late entry into primary school has declined over the past few
years. According to Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, 59 percent of
children aged seven years were enrolled in school in 2010, which is a significant
increase compared with 29 percent in 2004–05. Nonetheless this falls still short
of the government’s target of complete enrollment at the age of seven, showing
that late and nonenrollment remain important challenges. In addition,remarkable progress has been made in reducing the number of older children in
primary school, mainly due to increased (and earlier) transition to secondary
school. But still too many students complete primary school at a time when they
are ready to enter the labor force. Bringing children into primary school earlier—
through improvements in early childhood nutrition, a reduction in the compulsory
school age, and investments in school quality—remains an important
objective to ensure optimal learning, facilitate the transition to secondary school,
and increase lifetime earnings.