Tanzania makes progress in education, health sectors: World Bank

The World Bank and its partners said on Friday Tanzania has made significant progress in delivering education and health services, particularly in the areas of rural health infrastructure and teacher attendance.

According to the latest Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) jointly produced with REPOA and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), health infrastructure was improving rapidly, especially in rural Tanzania, going from 5 percent of health facilities with clean water, power, and improved sanitation in 2010 to 36 percent in 2014.

However, the new data also highlighted weaknesses that were contributing to low levels of learning in primary schools and tragic mortality levels among mothers and newborns. Tanzania's maternal mortality rate is at 432 deaths per 100,000 live births.

"While Tanzania has reduced child mortality, mothers and newborns are still at high risk of untimely death; and while the country has achieved near-universal primary school enrollment, one in four children cannot read a paragraph in Kiswahili in Standard Four," said Keith Hansen, World Bank Group Vice President for Human Development.

Service Delivery Indicators are public data that citizens can use to hold the government accountable for education and health services, and that the government can use to inform reform efforts in these sectors.

As Tanzania aspires to achieve middle-income status by 2025, SDI is an example of the kind of data transparency and accountability that could be transformational.

The data showed that serious challenges remained, including getting more health workers out to rural areas, which have only 9 percent of the country's doctors and 28 percent of its health workforce, and boosting their diagnostic capacity.

The data showed that three out of five health workers cannot identify severe dehydration, a fatal condition for children.

In education, teacher absenteeism from schools has fallen sharply by 40 percent, leading to 24 more teaching days a year, said the data.

However, 37 percent of the teachers who were in school were still not in the classroom and teaching, showed the data.

Therefore, it said, classroom absence remained a challenge and pointed to school leadership and management issues, adding that teacher-pupil ratios have become more manageable, dropping by 20 percent across the country, but remained very high in urban schools.

"Importantly, teacher knowledge continues to be a serious issue, with only one in five mastering the curriculum they teach," said the data.

The World Bank, REPOA and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) have partnered to produce this round of data for Tanzania.

SDI surveys have so far been done in eight African countries-- Kenya, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, and Uganda, capturing the service delivery experience of 370 million people. Tanzania and Senegal pioneered these surveys in 2010. Endit