TANZANIA IN FOCUS 
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(source John Piper, DFID)
Government giving to Tanzania has more than doubled in four years reaching $130 million last year. What changes have been made and have they been effective?
The bi-lateral budget given to Tanzania in 2003 was $60million. By 2007 it had become $130million. The reason for the increase is down to the success of the programmes that have proven to be effective and had delivered results according to the Government.
Since the introduction of budget support in Tanzania, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) went up from 11% to 15% according to DFID. Instead of having individual programmes to improve hospitals, building schools or paying for different stand alone projects, the UK government put money into the Tanzanian government budget. This allows discussions on systematic issues together with how the budget was to be spent. Also discussed is how the country wishes to procure goods and then begin to tackle corruption issues. This is reviewed every six months.
THE BAD NEWS … “Head of Tanzania sacked”
As a UK tax payer, we may be disconcerted to find out that some of the funds we are providing through our taxes have been used incorrectly by the Tanzanian government. Firstly they purchased a controversial radar system costing $40 million, despite UK government objections.
More recently an external audio of the Bank of Tanzania showed that US$100 million had been wrongly used or lost through corruption and given to 22 companies from the Central Bank. As a result of this the Head of the Bank of Tanzania was sacked. This is a direct result of governments actively pursuing corruption and taking action and holding people to account.
And in February 2008 Tanzania’s prime minister and entire cabinet resigned after being implicated in corruption over an electricity contract (source bbc.co.uk/Africa February 2008). To eliminate corruption from the system potentially could be difficult, but improvements are being made by the Corruption Prevention Bureau in Tanzania.
GOOD NEWS …”Budget support is not suspended”
However, DFID has not suspended budget support as a result of such incidents of corruption, only because of concerns about the progress on key reforms. It has also been concluded that budget support had predominantly increased government accountability to its 35 donors.
The majority of the money was spent on education and health in order to tackle the Millennium Development Goals. DFID states that “since the abolition of school fees in Tanzania in 2001 the number of children enrolled in primary schools has increased from 4.4 million in 2000 to 8 million by 2006 with 97% of children now enrolled; the number of teachers has increased by a quarter and the number of schools by a fifth.” (DFID)
COMPARE OUR DIFFERENCES …
In the UK, 40% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is spent by our Government for Health and Education.
In Tanzania, aid that the UK is providing into Tanzania is 12% of their GDP (plus on average 14% of revenues) equalling 28% of GDP (own revenues and aid).
THE BAD NEWS … “HIV programmes are impossibly under-funded”
The most worrying disparity between our health spending is that Tanzania’s budget for each person is $12/head. This is all it can afford to tackle the enormous problem of HIV within the country. Within that amount, it aims to tackle prevention and vaccination for the under 5s. In real terms it costs $250 per person per year and is nowhere near covered from of a budget of $12.
THE GOOD NEWS … “Bush drops funds into Tanzania’s health system”
It may seem that the US may rescue this situation. They are the biggest multilateral donor. They promise to deliver their two Presidential Initiatives focusing on HIV and malaria, focusing on preventing the spread and mitigating the impact of HIV/AIDS, combating malaria. Aid given to the Ministry of Health in this form will certainly would not be turned down by a Government who only has a budget of $12 per person.
THE BAD NEWS AGAIN … “Disease is rife”
Surprisingly, pumping aid into a country can have a detrimental effect on the country’s own growth prospects and is known as Dutch Disease. It can undermine the systems that are in place. When it is possible for the economy to produce its own resources and then tax according to the structure of their own economy; then outside aid (being 12% GDP) being brought in alongside those resources in to the country has a very "destabilizing" effect. That 12% of free resources can throw the internal allocations systems into chaos. The aid may improve the wages of teachers and nurses but then those educated people who come up through university then won’t go in to the business sector where workers are needed to improve business.
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"Local health care for the Tanzanian doesn’t exist unless you have money to pay for it. So no, nothing has improved there.”
“Hospitals are badly run, badly funded, all health workers are poorly trained and under-motivated as they are paid extremely badly. It’s the same for teachers. Local schools are in terrible shape.”
(Paul Hicks, Founder of Tanzanian Charities Network)