Narrow Results

The present study assesses the perceptions of female entrepreneurs in Tanzania regarding the access to bank loans and the difficulties experienced in the process of financing their businesses. Focusing on small-scale businesses, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 75 female entrepreneurs from the Dar es Salaam area. Resorting to double-hurdle estimation models, we conclude that: 1) women who perceive higher discrimination and/or inequality in accessing bank loans, but who also recognize that female entrepreneurs often lack relevant business skills, tend to apply more often for bank loans; 2) women running larger business, operating in the tailoring industry, face fewer difficulties; 3) although highly educated female entrepreneurs apply less for bank loans, formal education acts as a shield to the difficulties faced by women when applying to bank loans; 4) more autonomous and money seeking female entrepreneurs are less likely to report difficulties during the bank loan application process.

Improved access to clean water is important in improving health, relieving drudgery for women, and in designing and implementing effective poverty alleviation strategies. However, few empirical studies have had the objective of establishing the link between community participation and management, and sustainability of community based water utility projects. In addition, there is no consensus on the analytical techniques to use for sustainability assessment. This paper uses data collected from community water utility projects in two regions in Central Tanzania to demonstrate the use of canonical correlation analysis in sustainability assessment. The advantage of canonical correlation analysis is that the results are invariant with respect to the basis in which the variables are transformed. In addition, the analytical technique leads itself to identifying what management issues need to be addressed at the project level, to improve both community participation and management, and hence sustainability of such types of projects.

This paper establishes best practices for community-based environmental assessment (CBEA) in Kenya and Tanzania and examines what participants in community-centered approaches to environmental assessment have learned. Three CBEA cases involving water supply projects were studied using interview methods and action research. Findings show that best practices for encouraging meaningful community involvement include providing access and adequate notice to participants, fairer cost sharing, broader representation of women and youth, participant understanding of the CBEA facilitator and culturally appropriate sharing of findings. Learning outcomes attributable to the CBEA process included technical skills for erosion control, new information about environmental assessment (EA) regulations and shared values of environmental sustainability and community unity. An application of selected best practice approaches in a test case, in order to encourage greater participation and learning, had mixed success. For example, attempts at providing early notice still resulted in it being far too late for most participants and only about one-third of the participants were women. However, a pictograph functioned as an effective tool for reporting CBEA results to the community and demonstrating learning outcomes.

A crucial challenge in the teaching and learning of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing non-Western countries is the irrelevance of much Western learning content, materials, tools, and methods from the perspectives of local communities. Our approach for designing an ICT course is based on the concept of ethnocomputing — finding culturally suitable entry points for understanding, utilizing, and producing ICT in a relevant way. In order to study the feasibility of our approach, we designed a contextualized introductory programming course with Tumaini University, Tanzania, and offered it to second-year undergraduate students in teacher education in the academic year 2004–2005. The approach was to encourage students to create programs that would meet the needs of their own local communities. The course made extensive use of learning technologies, such as robotics, to concretize the first steps in understanding ICT. We applied an ethnocomputing-based analysis to three aspects: (1) the development process of the course; (2) the role of learning technologies in the course; and (3) students' contextual learning outcomes. First, representation, utilization, and appropriation appeared at various stages in the development of the course. These included unexpected spin-offs for local communities, such as the introduction of educational robotics to assist young patients in a rural hospital. Second, contextual relevance of learning technologies — digital learning materials, the robotic I-BLOCKs, and the Jeliot program visualization tool — was analyzed by the CATI model, and the results indicate their relevance at all the four levels of the model: Contextualization, Application, Transfer, and Import. Third, student learning outcomes were observed by using content analysis of questionnaires and interviews. There is evidence that students developed a contextual understanding of ICT, especially at the application level of the CATI model. Overall, the study indicates that an ethnocomputing-based analysis can be used for designing needs-based ICT education by analyzing its feasibility with various operationalizations of the ethnocomputing concept. Moreover, research results envisage new components and methods for an entirely contextualized undergraduate curriculum of ICT.

Irrigation has significant potential to enhance productivity, resilience to climatic risks and nutrition security in Sub-Saharan Africa. While the focus has historically been on large-scale dam-based schemes, farmer-managed small-scale irrigation (SSI) has gained increased attention in recent years. Using data from Ethiopia, Tanzania and Ghana, we first examine patterns of adoption of different SSI technologies. Next, we employ hierarchical modelling to examine which variables are associated with observed adoption patterns and cluster effects that explain variation in irrigation adoption. We document significant cross-country variation in adoption patterns and find a positive association between plot-level use of SSI and the intensity of agricultural labor and inorganic fertilizers applied on the plot. Community-level intra-cluster correlation (ICC) is the highest in Tanzania, where gravity-fed irrigation is most common while farm-level ICC is the highest in Ethiopia where motorized technologies are more common. These results suggest the need for localized investments to ease locale-specific potential constraints. For example, easing possible liquidity constraints to acquiring motorized technologies can be more effective in Ethiopia while the construction of dams and improved conveyance systems, as well as the strengthening of community-based irrigation management (e.g., through Water User Associations (WUAs)) can be more effective in Tanzania. Further research is needed to understand pathways for selected plot-level characteristics that affect use of SSI including status of plot ownership and the gender of the plot manager.

This paper reveals the source of rapid economic growth in Tanzania since market reform in the late 1980s. It applies the variance bounds cointegration test to economic growth, investment, exports, and aid inflow. The cointegration test results show that these variables are cointegrated. The error correction model shows that export expansion causes economic growth positively. Meanwhile, economic growth is revealed not to cause export expansion. The results are robust to the measure of economic growth rate. Neither investment nor aid inflow is revealed to be the source of the rapid economic growth of Tanzania.

The UN defines 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Quality Management (QM) should logically be an asset for sustainability in supporting systematic changes to achieve these goals. Synergies between quality and sustainability have been discussed but it seems that considerable synergies are yet to be realised. Finding practical examples for synergies will be essential. Buildings play an important role in sustainability. Most new buildings are constructed in developing countries. Buildings provide the basic need for shelter but are also a major source of carbon emissions. Africa, with the youngest population, will need large-scale building activities to comply with the UN SDGs. Buildings, globally and in developing countries, could be an interesting research area for identifying potential synergies between quality and sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to exemplify quality theory’s contributions to sustainability. Possible synergies are highlighted based on the processes of global cement manufacturing and building block production in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A brief review of suggested synergies between quality and sustainability was conducted. Chosen models used for describing synergies were reviewed. These models have then been applied to the global process of cement manufacturing and a regional process of block production. The resulting presentations are analysed and areas of synergies are identified. Our findings indicate that quality theory could provide strong support, generally for sustainability and specifically for better buildings. The work indicates several interesting areas of possible synergies between quality and sustainability. New insights are presented for how QM could support sustainable development.

Developing countries are witnessing an increased use of indigenous knowledge (IK) products by people of all backgrounds who use them for various purposes including maintenance of human health. In recognizing the importance of indigenous knowledge, several initiatives have been taken by governments. This chapter explores the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and its emerging technologies on the management of indigenous knowledge in Tanzania. It also discusses the background information on Tanzania and its indigenous knowledge. This chapter argues that Tanzania has made considerable progress in recognizing the value of indigenous knowledge for competitiveness advantages, but more needs to be done to address the identified challenges in managing such knowledge in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This chapter offers recommendations on how to harness the potential of the 4IR to the management of indigenous knowledge. The conclusion explains that emerging technologies have not been sufficiently and effectively used in managing indigenous knowledge as has been done in education, banking, and other industrial sectors. Some strategies are discussed to address these challenges in managing indigenous knowledge including capacity building through education to all indigenous knowledge stakeholders.

To investigate the relationships between helminth infections and iron status among school-aged children, 1,115 Tanzanian children in grades 2 through 5 were randomly assigned to treatment or control groups. The children in the treatment group were screened for infection with Schistosoma haematobium and hookworm at baseline, 3 months, and 15 months; infected children were given albendazole against hookworm and praziquantel against schistosomiasis. The control group received a placebo and did not undergo parasitological screening until 15 months after the baseline. Hematological variables were compared between the treatment and control groups. The main results were, first, that the hemoglobin concentration significantly improved after treatment for hookworm (p < .001) by 9.3 g/L in children treated for hookworm only and by 8.8 g/L in children treated for hookworm and schistosomiasis. The ferritin concentration also improved in children treated for schistosomiasis (p = .001) or hookworm (p = .019). Second, a longitudinal analysis of the data from the children in the control group showed that hookworm and schistosomiasis loads were negatively associated with hemoglobin and ferritin concentrations. Moreover, ferritin concentrations increased as C-reactive protein levels increased. Overall, the results showed that anthelmintic treatment is a useful tool for reducing anemia in areas with high hookworm and schistosomiasis endemicity. The empirical relationship between ferritin and C-reactive protein indicated that simple procedures for adjusting cutoff points for the use of ferritin as an indicator of low iron stores were unlikely to be useful in this population.

Despite economic theory and empirical literature that have shown that wide availability of business services contributes significantly to productivity gains and growth, economic modelers have been slow to meaningfully incorporate services into their models. This paper employs a 52-sector, small, open-economy computable general equilibrium model of the Tanzanian economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business service providers in Tanzania. The model incorporates foreign direct investment in services, and productivity effects in both goods and services markets endogenously through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. The paper summarizes and builds on the surveys and policy notes of the regulatory regimes in business services in Tanzania, and estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign direct investment. The paper estimates significant gains to Tanzania from services reforms, especially in banking, maritime and road transportation Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest gains will derive from liberalization of non-discriminatory regulatory barriers.