Education in Tanzania

The Challenges facing education sector in Tanzania are: 

• low quality education provided in public schools, overcrowded classrooms (it is very common to find a classroom with 120 students with one teacher), 

• lack of adequate teaching and learning materials such as books, charts, models, apparatus and teaching aids. In-adequate well organized extra-curricular activities to develop students holistically. 

• Sports and games are given less value and sometimes they are not implemented, this has resulted into killing students’ talents, skills and creativity.

• Theoretical learning has persisted in government schools for decades, schools have not been able to organize excursions and experiential learning due to inadequate budget provided by the government.  

• The lack of furniture in some schools has forced schools to operate in shifts, some students go to school in the morning (first shift) and some go in the afternoon (second shift). 

These few and many more challenges created a need for private sectors and people with passion to establish schools to come up with idea on how to solve this challenge.

In addition, there are three major categories of schools operating in Tanzania.

1. Government (public) schools- Kiswahili Medium schools. They are owned by government and accommodated more than 70% of all pupils.

2. Private schools- English medium schools owned by either church, private organization, individuals. These schools use National Curriculum. They accommodate approx. 25% of the total population of pupils going to school. Ely school will fall under this category.

3. Private International schools- These are registered and follow the international curriculum from Britain eg IGCS. They are very expensive schools and few parents can afford. They accommodate 5% of the total population of pupils in schools.

According to TBS- Tanzania Bureau of Statistics ‘’An increase in population resulted to increase in the absolute number of poor people. In 2018, about 14 million people lived below the national poverty line of TZS 49,320 per adult equivalent per month and about 26 million (about 49 percent of the population) lived below the $1.90 per person per day international poverty line. Vulnerability is also still high: for every four Tanzanians who moved out of poverty, three fell into it. A large number of nonpoor people living just above the poverty line are at risk of slipping below it. Beyond the persistent gaps between urban and rural areas, there are large disparities in the distribution of poverty across geographic regions.’’ (Source: Tanzania Mainland Poverty Assessment Report)

It is with all these reasons that schools with terms and conditions like Ely school need to be established so as to alleviate poverty and raise people standard of living.