This report identifies lessons from Tanzania's development experience over the past four decades, and assesses how a higher sustained growth and a better livelihood for its citizens in the future can be achieved. The background papers: review and evaluate the country's growth and poverty reduction performance; highlight the strategic and institutional imperatives needed for developing sustained growth and reducing poverty; and consider the development of the private sector and its increased role in the growth and modernisation of the Tanzanian economy.
The study builds on lessons from Tanzania's development experience of the past four decades, with emphasis on the period following the 1996 Country Economic Memorandum, which focused on the challenge of reforms, in particular the impact of reforms on growth, incomes, and welfare in the country. The study assesses Tanzania's current development status against the country's ambition, since independence, to rid the nation of three archenemies: poverty, ignorance, and disease. Structural transformation has been extremely limited, with agriculture still dominating the economy, a non-diversified economy that hampers flexibility to withstand shock occurrences. Nonetheless, the country intensified macroeconomic policy reforms, significantly stabilizing the economy, with falling inflation levels, climbing foreign exchange reserves, and an overall fiscal balance. But the main factors identified behind the slow development progress, are primarily inadequate capital accumulation, and productivity growth; poor support for the transformation of agriculture; disrupted progress in building human capital; and, delayed demographic transition. However, the steady progress in reorienting its economy to a market-based operation, is creating space for exploiting the large potential of private sector initiative. It is emphasized that growth will only be sustainable, if firmly rooted in exploiting the domestic resource base, international competitiveness, and an aggressive pursuit of new export opportunities. -- Publisher description.
The study builds on lessons from Tanzania's development experience of the past four decades, with emphasis on the period following the 1996 Country Economic Memorandum, which focused on the challenge of reforms, in particular the impact of reforms on growth, incomes, and welfare in the country. The study assesses Tanzania's current development status against the country's ambition, since independence, to rid the nation of three archenemies: poverty, ignorance, and disease. Structural transformation has been extremely limited, with agriculture still dominating the economy, a non-diversified economy that hampers flexibility to withstand shock occurrences. Nonetheless, the country intensified macroeconomic policy reforms, significantly stabilizing the economy, with falling inflation levels, climbing foreign exchange reserves, and an overall fiscal balance. But the main factors identified behind the slow development progress, are primarily inadequate capital accumulation, and productivity growth; poor support for the transformation of agriculture; disrupted progress in building human capital; and, delayed demographic transition. However, the steady progress in reorienting its economy to a market-based operation, is creating space for exploiting the large potential of private sector initiative. It is emphasized that growth will only be sustainable, if firmly rooted in exploiting the domestic resource base, international competitiveness, and an aggressive pursuit of new export opportunities.
Tanzania, the land and the people have been subject of a great deal of historical research, but there remains no readily accessible and concise history of the country. The aim of this volume is to fill that void. A New History of Tanzania takes its name from a lecture series introduced at the University of Dar es Salaam by Professor Isaria Kimambo in 2002. Prior to that, a book titled, A History of Tanzania, had been published in 1969 by East African Publishing House in Nairobi for the Tanzania Historical Association. That book is currently out of print and this is not a reprint. In this book, Prof. Kimambo has been joined by two other colleagues; Prof. Gregory H. Maddox of Texas Southern University, Houston (USA) and Salvatory S. Nyanto, a Tanzanian, Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa (USA); together they have produced an outline history of Tanzania that covers all important aspects from antiquity to the present that is different from and richer than its predecessor. Sources from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, biology, genetics and oral tradition have been used to produce this excellent book. A New History of Tanzania is a timely contribution to academic requirements for teaching and learning Tanzania’s history. It is also a possible exemplar to the writing of other countries’ histories, departing as it does, from the traditional historiography that is influenced by colonial and postcolonial apologists of nefarious external influences on Africa’s history. It will also interest other Tanzanians and visitors to Tanzania who are interested in understanding the country from when it was a territory with more than one hundred and twenty ethnic groups, to a nation with an unmistakable identity as it marches forward.
This research unravels the economic collapse of the Datoga pastoralists of central and northern Tanzania from the 1830s to the beginning of the 21st century. The research builds from the broader literature on continental African pastoralism during the past two centuries. Overall, the literature suggests that African pastoralism is collapsing due to changing political and environmental factors. My dissertation aims to provide a case study adding to the general trends of African pastoralism, while emphasizing the topic of competition as not only physical, but as something that is ethnically negotiated through historical and collective memories. There are two main questions that have guided this project: 1) How is ethnic space defined by the Datoga and their neighbours across different historical times? And 2) what are the origins of the conflicts and violence and how have they been narrated by the state throughout history? Examining archival sources and oral interviews it is clear that the Datoga have struggled through a competitive history of claims on territory against other neighbouring communities. The competitive encounters began with the Maasai entering the Serengeti in the 19th century, and intensified with the introduction of colonialism in Mbulu and Singida in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The fight for control of land and resources resulted in violent clashes with other groups. Often the Datoga were painted as murderers and impediments to development. Policies like the amalgamation measures of the British colonial administration in Mbulu or Ujamaa in post-colonial Tanzania aimed at confronting the “Datoga problem,” but were inadequate in neither addressing the Datoga issues of identity, nor providing a solution to their quest for land ownership and control.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was ready to adopt the gold standard out of concerns of national power, prestige, and anti-English competition. Yet although the gold standard allowed countries to enact a virtual single world currency, the years before World War I were not a time of unfettered liberal economics and one-world, one-market harmony. Outside of Europe, the gold standard became a tool for nationalists and protectionists primarily interested in growing domestic industry and imperial expansion. This overlooked trend, provocatively reassessed in Steven Bryan's well-documented history, contradicts our conception of the gold standard as a British-based system infused with English ideas, interests, and institutions. In countries like Japan and Argentina, where nationalist concerns focused on infant-industry protection and the growth of military power, the gold standard enabled the expansion of trade and the goals of the age: industry and empire. Bryan argues that these countries looked less to Britain and more to North America and the rest of Europe for ideological models. Not only does this history challenge our idealistic notions of the prewar period, but it also reorients our understanding of the history that followed. Policymakers of the 1920s latched onto the idea that global prosperity before World War I was the result of a system dominated by English liberalism. Their attempt to reproduce this triumph helped bring about the global downturn, the Great Depression, and the collapse of the interwar world.
Democracy in the Woods examines the trajectories of forest and land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico to explain how societies negotiate the tensions between environmental protection and social justice. It shows that the social consequences of environmental protection depend, almost entirely, on political intermediation of competing claims to environmental resources.
Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.
Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.
