Strengthening Primary Education - Tanzania

Tanzania has made impressive strides to increase enrollment at the primary school level through its mandate for “fee-free” primary education across the country. However, the rapid increase has not included sufficient investments to improve education quality. As a result, children leave school without age-appropriate reading, writing, or arithmetic skills. A national assessment in 2012 found that by class 7, the last year of primary school, less than half of the students could read a class 2 level story in English. This severely limits the number of students who can advance to secondary school and puts into question the quality of education children actually receive in primary school. Our CBO grantee-partners in Tanzania are piloting and iterating on a variety of models to effectively improve children’s learning outcomes. Each partner takes a holistic and innovative approach to address key challenges that limit children’s success in school – including child vulnerabilities, family vulnerabilities, and poor learning environments at schools. They work to increase community involvement in children’s early learning and to develop community-led solutions that could be replicated or scaled by other civil society organizations or government. Because of the link between early childhood and primary school outcomes, two of our grantee-partners have established and are supporting community-based early childhood development programs, especially for groups who are marginalized or otherwise vulnerable to extreme poverty. Other grantee-partners are implementing a variety of approaches at the early primary level ­­­– deploying community-based volunteers to tutor children at home, setting up remedial classes for struggling students, training teachers in child-friendly pedagogy, and creating supportive afterschool learning programs. Our grant funding not only included direct grants for all five organizations but also included support for the Community Grantmaker, Tanzania Home Economics Association (TAHEA), which has provided funding and support to ten additional small grassroots youth groups as part of their Vutamdogo program. The youth groups are also trained in income-generating activities, and some have even gone on to establish themselves as full community-based organizations. In addition, with training in social accountability strategies, our CBO grantee-partners are holding government accountable in different ways – from training community volunteers to continuously monitor expenditure and performance of school capitation grants to engaging community members to help renovate school kitchen facilities.