REASONS WHY POVERTY ALLEVIATION STRATEGIES FAILS IN TANZANIA

Poverty is a general scarcity or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. It is a state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials to enjoy a minimum standard of life and well-being that is considered acceptable in society. 

Poverty alleviation strategies involve strategic use of tools such as education, economic development, health and income redistribution to improve livelihoods of world’s poorest by governments and the internationally approved organizations. They also aim at removing social and legal barriers to income growth among poor. 

In case of Tanzania, the level of poverty is high and it is one of the poorest countries in the world mostly in terms of per capita income. Poverty in Tanzania is mostly found in rural areas where people are living extremely poor in arid and semi-arid regions that depend mostly on livestock and food crop production. 

Therefore, the government of united republic of Tanzania took some strategies so as to reduce poverty situation, some reforms have been undertaken by the government to improve macroeconomic performance including Domestic revenue, social service delivery (education, water, health services) and infrastructures mostly rural roads and electrification.

There are medium term strategies initiated in Tanzania with the aim of alleviating poverty which started with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) covering the period 2000-2004 followed by National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP I) in 2005. The current strategy is outlined in the Second National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP II) Popularly known as MKUKUTA II that covers the period 2010-2015.

These strategies focus on reducing poverty and improving the standards of living and social welfare as well as governance and accountability. For example MKUKUTA I was marked by significant improvements in the energy telecommunication and infrastructure particularly roads. Such that, the provision of these services made possible increasing government revenues from a monthly average of 177 billion in 2005/2006 to 390 billion in 2009/2010.

However, there are challenges that are faced by these poverty alleviation strategies in their implementations in Tanzania. These challenges include;

Budget Formulation and Execution; there is inadequate capacity in planning, formulating and managing economic infrastructure programs and projects to ensure value for public investments. This is due to limited capacity of key factors in the investment planning process. For example, during the exercises of MKUKUTA this involved extensive review of project write-ups document, it was noted that some project managers formulated substandard project documents that do not adhere to the plan and budget guidelines of 2010/2011-2013/2014. 

So due to this challenge, the government adopted MKUKUTA II that focuses mainly on scarce budget resources and strengthening evidence based planning and resource allocation.

Un-predictability and Un-reliability of foreign resources; the foreign resources includes the foreign aids, the predictability of these resources has remained a challenge in planning and budget process. Foreign assistance are essential for effective planning and execution of the budget process.  The foreign funded projects are low comparing to their commitments, this is due to inadequate information coordination between the government and the development partner so as to finance the government budget, mostly development budgets largely funded by the donors.

Due to this challenge, the government adopted Aid Management Platform (AMP) as a tool for collating and publication of timely and detailed information about foreign assistance where is easy form to access and contribute to more effective aid. Such that the government uses Aid Management Platform as a tool for budget preparation and implementation of MKUKUTA II. (Susanne, 2007)

Presence of corruption; this is also a major challenge facing poverty alleviation strategies in their implementation. These strategies aim at reducing poverty situation especially in rural areas, some of services aimed to be provided to rural people do not reach to them effectively, this is due to corruption among the concerned official who are responsible to provide those services to the rural poor, they tend to use those services for their own benefits, so this makes poverty alleviation strategies not to be fully implemented. Example the TASAF strategy for poverty reduction in rural areas, most of rural areas that were intended to be provided services to the rural poor areas were not implemented and those areas did not receive those services due to corruption.

Therefore, for this challenge to be addressed there has to be new accountable leaders who will bring good governance. As now our president Hon. John Magufuli exempts workers and the officials who are not accountable. This will help in reducing corruption status in Tanzania and bring accountability, so as these strategies will be able to be implemented as planned.

Inadequate infrastructures; for example of MKUKUTA strategy face a challenge of infrastructures including offices and its equipment, communications and housings, this lead to insufficient running process of the strategy implementation. 

So, there has to be improved infrastructure so as the implementation these strategies can be smoothly implemented. Since presence of inadequate infrastructure causes poverty, there should be the improvement of the infrastructures.

Inadequate prioritization and coordination of interventions; By design, coordination and prioritization of interventions should have been done at sector and cluster levels; but this could not be adequately achieved because the actors did not fully comply with the implementation guidance; hence, implementation was weak and unsatisfactory, especially because Millennium development goals (MDAs’) contributions to a particular outcome tended to be inadequate. Guidance on the implementation of various interventions by sectors within a cluster setting was also inadequate. Furthermore, collaboration in planning, budgeting, and implementation at MKUKUTA Cluster, sectors, and MDAs levels was weak.

Slow pace of reform implementation; MKUKUTA proposed several processes and reforms for enhancing implementation effectiveness. However, there has been slow pace in implementation, inadequate complementarities between and alignment among the processes and reforms. To that effect, implementation is still characterized by weak collaboration and poor linkages in tapping synergies embedded in both core and sectorial reforms.

Insufficient resources for strategies implementation; resources is the main component for any activity to be implemented, but on the other side it is not possible conduct any activity without having enough resources, for example resources to fund MKUKUTA activities have often fallen short of the approved allocations. This necessitated reallocation of resources and in some instances phasing out some of the activities, disregarding their levels of priority.