A Consideration of Poverty Reduction Policy in Tanzania

Abstract

The poverty reduction regime is replacing the structural adjustment regime in the world of development, and Tanzania, one of the poorest countries, has not escaped this trend. Here, I examine three constraints of Tanzania’s present poverty reduction policy. The first constraint is lack of “ownership” of the national policy by Tanzanian government. Like the structural adjustment program, the poverty reduction policy was imposed by donors as a conditionality for external debt reduction under the HIPC initiative. Tanzanian bureaucrats are able to prepare policy papers which the donors require, but they lack the enthusiasm and dynamism to achieve the externally imposed policy objectives. The second constraint is that the target of the policy is vague. Since independence, Tanzanian government has produced a series of national development programs with over optimistic objectives and unrealistic target figures; and this attitude toward planning is maintained in the poverty reduction policy. In this case, however, the government must demonstrate that the policy is achieving progress to donors. To give the appearance of performing this assignment well, the government tried to lower the hurdle by extending the period for halving of poverty and by underestimating the poverty rate. The third constraint is that the rural people who are the main target group of this policy are only half-heartedly committed to the policy. Rural people have fresh and unhappy memories of government policies on education and decentralization. These were components of government-led development during the heyday of the Ujamaa policy in the 1970s. Rural people suspect that the present poverty reduction policy is a revival of the Ujamaa policy. They are likely to silently resist the current policy as they did the earlier macro policies. I will demonstrate that the rural people view the poverty reduction policy as another policy imposed “from above,” and the government views it as another imposed “from outside.” The policy emphasizing “ownership” and “participatory approach” has inconsistency between its ideal and reality. How the rural Tanzanians and their government survive as the real tough “customers” in the international forum of development is one of the attractive themes in the field of the area studies.