Constantly viewed as an example of potential, progress, and stability in the African region, Tanzania is still a hopeful country. The nation is recognized for its famous and rare blend of inclusivity, pluralism, and unity. However, like other third-world countries, many people in the country, specifically marginalized groups, need help to accomplish or pursue their goals as citizens, parents, and workers. This results from the various challenges the country encounters in its quest for economic, social, and political development. Establishments within the international economic environment, namely escalation in food and oil prices, and global economic and financial crises continue to affect the country’s economic development (Anyimadu, 2016). These challenges affect the country’s economy in numerous ways, namely the flow of finances such as foreign direct investment and trade through exports that form the primary transmission channels.
Nevertheless, despite the above challenges, they also present Tanzania with numerous opportunities to ensure its political, economic, and social development and growth. Moreover, the regional and international development of policies continues to shape Tanzania’s interaction with other countries for strategic development. Therefore, the above challenges and opportunities present the need for Tanzania to formulate strategies to ensure its development (USAID, 2020). This paper analyzes the developmental challenges facing Tanzania, the country’s developmental strategies and their effectiveness, and government motivation. It outlines alternative, realistic, and strategic paths for improving Tanzania’s development.
Economically, since 2013, Tanzania has seen its foreign direct investment plunge. Moreover, the country also experienced a fall in the ease of business due to hostile taxation, trade postures, and obstacles to beginning a business (Isaga & Musabila, 2017). The Tanzanian government’s robust emphasis on its industrialization agenda and mobilization of resources acted as a barrier to the enabling environment for businesses in the country. These comprise problems of compliance with the demands of taxation and elevated competition for capital. The formal unemployment rate among youths stands at four percent, but it does not include discouraged or underemployed personnel. There is a bleak image in terms of what the data says; for instance, annually, approximately eight hundred youths get into the workforce, whereas at the same time, only three hundred and thirty-seven thousand novel jobs are made available (USAID, 2020). The latest investigation highlights the decrease in employment opportunities in the formal sector, with the number of new job opportunities in the private sector standing at a third of what was seen in 2013.
Socially, after establishing universal fee-free primary education in 2015, the number of enrolled learners within primary schools escalated, whereas classrooms and teachers’ availability decreased. Such transformation has impacted the quality of education in Tanzania, resulting in a drop in early-grade reading scores. It is also surprising and troubling that Tanzania’s secondary school education completion rate stands at only thirty-one percent. Furthermore, within the health sector, the average life expectancy in Tanzania increased by sixteen years (Frumence et al., 2013). The country also registered significant improvements in terms of child mortality, and there has also been a reported decline in the number of novel HIV infections as of 2018. Irrespective of the above progress registered by Tanzania, infant and maternal mortality and undernutrition are still high (USAID, 2020). As a result of these persistent weaknesses and the elevated demand due to the increasing population, the country risks retreating the advances witnessed within the health sector.
Politically, Tanzania has seen the worst cases of the media being censored by the government and journalists harassed by the government. The country’s ranking in terms of world press freedom plunged by fifty-three positions between 2016 and 2020 (Anyimadu, 2016)). Moreover, Tanzania also witnesses deep concerns regarding arrests, disappearances, and arrests numbers as of 2017, with leaders from the opposition party, journalists, and activists facing these kinds of vices.
Due to the above challenges, the Tanzanian government has established various developmental strategies to ensure strong economic growth and poverty reduction. One of the developmental strategies includes the pursuit of comprehensive macroeconomic management. This developmental strategy aims to ensure favorable surroundings for critical economic actors to function in a predictable way. The economy’s sustained growth calls for predictable and stable macroeconomic conditions within Tanzania (Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, 2010). Therefore, the Tanzania government focuses on various critical strategic policy concerns such as the effects of financial policy, management of exchange rates, domestic sterilization, and ensuring consistency within several components of the country’s macro policy structure. In addition, the Tanzanian government looks to ensure macroeconomic stability. It has implemented various interventions to tackle balance in essential macro variables, such as interest, exchange, and inflation rates, outside debt and financial deficit, balance of payment, and facilitation of outside trade. Ultimately, the government of Tanzania has put systems and structures in place to ensure efficient supply and demand management within the country.
Another key developmental strategy is minimizing income poverty by facilitating sustainable, inclusive, and employment-enhancing development and growth. Tanzania has established various systems and interventions to propel the growth of its gross domestic products through multiple sectors such as manufacturing, infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, and mining. Moreover, these interventions focus on producing decent employment to lift the most economically underprivileged out of poverty. Therefore, the Tanzanian government’s strategy in this case is to promote growth and development that ensures inclusive growth, ensuring underprivileged populations are the primary beneficiaries. This includes accounting for the labor force structure, namely the increased employment rate among the young population.
To increase GDP growth, the Tanzanian government focuses on adopting pro-poor programs at the regional level and District Development Plans to create decent employment opportunities and promote growth. Additionally, it focuses on reinforcing and supporting access to and expansion of the private sector to financial markets, capital markets, and micro-finance to promote investments that enhance growth and development. Moreover, the Tanzanian government looks to coordinate, integrate, and harmonize strategies and policies that are environmentally sustainable to ensure growth in critical areas, namely climate change mitigation and adaptation (Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, 2010). Ultimately, the country has instituted initiatives to facilitate enabling and favorable business surroundings and minimize business activities’ costs. These comprise business regulations and legislation reforms, easing licensing and registration requirements to facilitate foreign and domestic investments, and improving business and market infrastructure and facilities for small-scale business operators.
Moreover, the Tanzanian government emphasizes guaranteeing sustenance and creating decent and productive job opportunities, particularly for youth, people with disabilities, and women. Strategically, the Tanzanian government can effectively accomplish this by implementing labor standards and laws and creating a structure to facilitate the competitiveness of Tanzanian citizens for economic gains and the integration of the international economy. Moreover, the Tanzanian government has implemented affirmative action in the creation of job opportunities for people with disabilities, youth, and women, along with the marginalized groups in the country (Lokina et al., 2016). It has also stepped up financial support from the financial sector to create dynamic and decent job opportunities. These comprise the provision of credit schemes for businesses, start-up capital to improve capability and capacity, and empowerment funds and cooperatives by considering the population pyramid structure and the improvement of opportunities for people with disabilities, youth, and women.
Adopting the above strategy has enabled the creation of productive and decent employment for youth, women, and people with disabilities and helped mitigate failures within the labor market, thus ensuring inclusivity in growth. Furthermore, the facilitation of youth employment through the developmental strategy has provided growth in the targeted poor regions in Tanzania (Msigwa & Kipesha, 2013). In addition, the strategy has effectively seen women in rural areas partake in productive programs and has helped address issues surrounding restricted access to inheritance and property affecting women.
In Tanzania, the government also stresses ensuring nutrition and food security, mitigation and adaptation measures for climate change, and environmental sustainability as developmental strategies. This developmental strategy ensures that the country achieves ecological sustainability, nutrition, and food security (WFP, 2022). Furthermore, it emphasizes dealing with and tackling the country’s adverse impacts of climate change. Therefore, to attain the above objective, the Tanzanian government has directed efforts to ensure farmers have adequate skills for implementing novel farming practices on agricultural practices (Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, 2010). In addition, the government has also put in place measures that focus on maintaining strategic grain reserves to promote food security.
Additionally, the government of Tanzania has put in place measures to ensure the promotion of infant and young children’s nutrition. This developmental strategy focuses on fighting malnutrition, which results in serious health challenges. Consequently, these strategies have seen balanced intakes of nutrients, availability of foods, strengthened environmental management, improved infrastructure, and enhanced technologies and research for mitigating climate change in urban and rural areas in Tanzania, ensuring food and nutritional security and also environmental sustainability (Pilato et al., 2018).
To avert the challenges above facing Tanzania, the Tanzanian government prioritizes various ways and motivations to ensure the country’s growth and development. One key motivation of the Tanzania government lies in its focus on the country being self-reliant. This is precisely the case and forms its central objective since the government of Tanzania looks to ensure the country’s transformation into a middle-income and semi-industrialized nation by 2025 (Msami & Wangwe, 2016). The Tanzanian government aims to achieve this by nurturing industrialization for human growth and development and transforming its economy. In addition, the government of Tanzania is hopeful to scaling up the quality and amount of investments, especially private investments, formulate a favorable business surrounding for investors, and stride towards ensuring the government becomes more accountable in tackling the issues affecting the country’s growth and development, and focusing on tackling poverty (USAID, 2020). This aligns with and facilitates the priorities of the Tanzanian government by stressing the development of human capital and a section of systems and organizations that the Tanzanian government has recognized as crucial for accomplishing and sustaining its long-lasting vision.
Additionally, the government of Tanzania is motivated to establish policies founded on the inferences of population-changing aspects along with the demographic surplus, establishing a close connection to the priorities of the mentioned strategies and their effectiveness. Moreover, the Tanzanian government is interested in collaborating with various international organizations and countries to help them realize their 2025 vision. This will help the government learn its priorities of increasing education and child health access and quality for a progressive labor force appropriate for its semi-industrialization dream (USAID, 2020). Furthermore, the Tanzanian government prioritizes reinforcing its non-state and state systems and institutions, backing necessary policy and legal reforms, ensuring government accountability, and effective natural resource management to help it accomplish its 2025 vision. The Tanzanian government established these motivations, emphasizing assisting the country in setting a competitive and robust economy.
Ultimately, for alternative, realistic, and strategic paths for Tanzania, there are various strategic approaches that the country should emulate to ensure its development. First, Tanzania’s growing and youthful population presents broad opportunities and potential for the country. The government of Tanzania must direct enough support for the youth from a tender age. Currently, Tanzania cannot fully meet its youth and children’s needs, and the continuous lack of investment in human capital will impede long-lasting growth (Kimaro, 2021). In the long and short term, such growth is required to ensure that novel entrants to the workforce are presented with enough employment opportunities. The youthful Tanzanian population is committed, motivated, and energized. Therefore, the Tanzanian government and its development partners must identify and use the youth’s desires and talents to develop a more engaged, empowered, and productive Tanzania (USAID, 2020). As a result of the above needs and opportunities, Tanzania must focus on collaborating with Tanzanians to assist youth in progressing the nation’s long-lasting prosperity and mission to self-reliance.
The Tanzanian government must predominantly emphasize enhancing the capacity of its citizens. This includes improving capacity in areas such as income, education, and health, disproportionately affecting youth and children. In addition, the government must focus on fostering commitment to accountable, transparent, and open governance to promote a booming economy (Kimaro, 2021). Furthermore, it should focus on employing age-targeted strategies to establish a person’s agency and enhance an enabling environment for the young population, such as young women and other marginalized populations, ensuring their productivity, engagement, and health. Apart from focusing on the youth, the Tanzanian government can initiate partnerships and collaboration with the private sector, civil societies, and development and interagency partners for sustained transformation in its development (USAID, 2020). This will ensure that Tanzania shares its burden with its partners and leverages opportunities with available actors. Ultimately, this will help solve its current developmental challenges.
In conclusion, Tanzania has long faced various developmental challenges, from economic, social, and political, as mentioned earlier. To prevent further burden by these challenges, the Tanzanian government has established different developmental strategies that aim to ensure its economic progress and development. These include nutrition and food security, environmental sustainability, sustenance and creation of decent and productive job opportunities for the youth, disabled, and women, minimizing income poverty, and the pursuit of sound macroeconomic management. Ultimately, a progressive Tanzania calls for prioritizing the youthful population and partnering with various investors.
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