by Arandeep Degun
Tanzania is a country in East Africa, including the three spice islands of Zanzibar, Mafia and Pemba. Tanzania is located immediately south of the Equator. The country is the site of Africa’s highest and lowest points: Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895 meters) above sea level and the Bed of Lake Tanganyika (352 meters) below sea level, respectively. The literary culture of Tanzania is mostly oral and consists of folktales, proverbs, riddles, songs and poems. There are 126 languages spoken in Tanzania; however, Swahili, which is meant to unify the nation, is the national language. Swahili is used in parliament, in the lower courts, as a medium of instruction in primary school and, as of March 2017, debatably in secondary school (see NOTE in bullet point 3), whereas English is used in diplomacy, foreign trade in higher courts and in higher education. In Tanzania, only about 10% of the population speak Swahili as a first language and the rest speak it as a second language! The challenges facing education in Tanzania and opportunities the future holds will be briefly highlighted in this article.
Tanzania_map-fr.svg: SémhurTranslation: Jen - Tanzania_map-fr.svg, CC BY-SA 4.0
Many challenges that have been pinpointed by the Cambridge Development Initiative (CDI). These focus on issues also highlighted in SDG #4: gender parity, teenage pregnancy, early marriage and sexual harassment; equity and access for all; youth unemployment and skills mismatch; education quality and resource constraints; embracing technological change and new teaching styles; and student welfare and emotional well-being. On-going challenges include:
1. Ingrained cultural and social prejudices strongly inhibit equity and access for Tanzanian girls at and above secondary school level. Tanzania has achieved gender parity as far as primary education. However, although a greater number of girls complete primary education, they are less likely to continue onto secondary education due to adolescent pregnancy and early marriage (a third of the girls marry by the age of 18). Girls from less privileged families are twice as likely to be married at an early age and also less likely to afford the transition to higher education. Girls are also more vulnerable to abuse if the schools are located at a great distance from their homes. Also, at present in Tanzania there is no system for the formal recognition of children with disabilities and their needs, therefore their access to any kind of education is remarkably decreased.(4)
2. The high rate of youth unemployment has been attributed to the education and skills mismatch caused by the poor quality of skills that the students graduate with and skills that are irrelevant for the present job market.(4)
3. An increasing number of students are graduating from secondary school without gaining essential skills in reading, writing and arithmetic. Apparently, much more emphasis is placed on enrollment instead of quality of education! Overcrowding, lack of qualified teachers and inadequate educational funding are major setbacks, inhibiting education at all levels. Multilingualism is also proving to be a hurdle. The UNESCO International Literacy Day 2019 theme, “Literacy and Multilingualism,” makes 
image created by Arandeep Degun, 2019 us aware that despite progress, challenges about literacy persist, and Tanzania is a prime example. While many factors can be attributed to limited secondary school participation amongst Tanzanian youth, language instruction plays a large role in discouraging students from continuing their academic studies beyond primary school. At primary school, the language of instruction is Swahili, with English as a meager supplemental language course. The abrupt transition to English instruction at secondary school oftentimes forces students to drop out due to difficulties in understanding and learning in English. Proper guidance for this linguistic transition is required and has to be looked into.(4) (NOTE: The information from CDI re: the official language of instruction in secondary schools is contradicted by the article Tanzania Adopts Swahili as the Official Language of Instruction in Schools, published a year earlier, stating that the official language of all instruction in primary and secondary schools is now Swahili. Clearly there is much to be managed in this arena.)
