Tanzania Leads Most SADC Countries in Poverty Reduction

The dream of Tanzania to acquire the middle income status by 2025 is becoming a reality. This time, the data extracted from the September 2019 version of the PovcalNet database has put Tanzania the first country in Africa that has reduced extreme poverty.

Early this year, the WB stated clearly that Tanzania’s middle income status will be achieved in 2021 instead of 2025 due to mega projects implemented by the government of President John Magufuli.

The report that has been also published in the World Bank Blogs states that Tanzania has reduced extreme poverty from 86% in 2000 to 49% in 2011, cutting its extreme poverty rate by 3.2 percentage points per year. This is about three times the pace of the average country in the region. Much more gains have been achieved in the last two years.

The report states that the rapid reduction in extreme poverty has been measured as the annual percentage point change in the international extreme poverty rate, circa 2000 to circa 2015. By this measure, Tanzania reduced extreme poverty the fastest in Sub-Saharan Africa, including, many SADC countries.  

The report has ranked  Chad and the Republic of Congo the second and third respectively after lowering their poverty rates by 3.1 and 2.7 percentage points per year respectively during this period. 

Monetary poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is based on household consumption and only represents one of many aspects of peoples’ economic well-being. The World Bank’s Multidimensional Poverty Measure (MPM) is an index that combines monetary poverty with additional welfare measures.

Since the MPM was only recently introduced, it is not yet possible to examine trends over time. As an alternative, two components of the MPM for which data are reported in the World Development Indicators: The share of primary-school-age children in school, and the share of the population with access to electricity.

Since November 2015, the government of Tanzania established the free education policy to both primary and secondary education to ensure all children are accessing education in the country.

In this regard, the government is allocating TZS 23.65bn/- every month to serve the purpose.  The policy has put the primary school enrolment at 35.5 percent and secondary school at 201.1% percent respectively.

Moreover, the government in the same period connected electricity to more than seven thousand villages among 12,000 villages. This implies that more than 67 percent of Tanzanians are connected with electricity.

To ensure that all Tanzanians are connected with electricity, the government is constructing   the fourth biggest dam in Africa and the biggest in East Africa at Mwalimu Nyerere  Hydro power project.

The 2,115 megawatts hydro power project is the fulfilment of the dream of the late father of the nation Mwalimu Julius Nyerere some years ago.

The project which is financed by taxpayers’ money at the cost of tsh 6 trillion ($ 3 billion) is expected to be completed by 2022. The government has already issued the biggest down payments worth tsh 688. 651/- billion ($309.645) for the purpose.