The Girl-Child and Government Service Provision.pdf - Tanzania ...

shifts in prices, altering the returns from productive assets;second, they change the prices of their most importantpurchases; and finally, they shift the level and compositionof government expenditures, particularly those in the socialsector” (ODI 1986, 1).SAPs impact on the health and nutrition ofwomen and childrenPublic expenditure cuts in the 1990s severely affected children,and more important, women and girls who not onlyhad to increase their contribution to cash earnings of thehousehold but also suffer the ill-health consequences associatedwith hard manual work during pregnancy and increasedpressure at home to look after the children andthe sick.SAPs also had an important impact on the condition ofwomen and girls in the household and society. In a greatmajority of households SAPs made extra direct and indirectdemands on the time and effort of women and girls.Women and girls had to enter the labour market to increasethe family’s income or increase their work on thefarm to take advantage of the increased prices for cashcrops. At the same time cutbacks in public-health expendituremeant shifting part of the health-care burden ontowomen and girls.User fees and cost sharing in the health sector have beenintroduced at times when rural incomes are dropping,meaning that many more poor households cannot affordto pay and therefore have no access to health services inTanzania.A study by TASOET in 2001 observed that 77 per cent ofthe total funding for a three-year district health projectwas expected to come from the donor community. Centralgovernment was able to contribute only 11 per centbecause a larger share of the of government’s resourceswere to be used on external debt servicing. The remainingamount was expected to come from local governments(11 per cent) and community members (1 per cent).The crisis in educationThe economic crisis increased the cost of schooling formany families and led to a delay in sending children toschool. The proportion of pupils entering primary schoolat the age of seven (the starting age) declined steadily from27 per cent of all school entrants in 1981 to 14 per centin 1990 (UNICEF 1990, 86). The delay in school enrolmentdid not seem to have any gender bias.In the early 1990s children also became economically activeoutside the home: “The number of children seen onthe main roads and the streets of Dar es Salaam and inother towns increased dramatically. Many of the childrenwere seen selling bread and other commodities to makesome money for themselves and for their families”(UNICEF 1990, 79).The crisis has also affected the age at which pupils leaveeducation. The drop-out rate has been increasing since theearly 1970s. In 1976 the drop-out rate stood at 18.5 percent. By 1981 it had risen to 24.2 per cent. Much of theincrease occurred at later years of schooling (NationalSocio-economic Profile of Tanzania 1989).The disparity in educational attainment continues into thesecondary school, where access is limited by the numberof available places; only 4.5 per cent of the annual 350,000primary-school leavers were admitted to secondaryschools in 1991 (Daily News [Dar es Salaam], October1991). Nor can many Tanzanians afford private schools,which have nevertheless experienced a substantial rise intheir intake – surpassing that of the state schools in themid-1980s (Ministry of Education and Culture).SAPs have introduced the following charges, among others,to the education sector: school fees (secondaryschools and tertiary levels), local financing, user chargesfor government services. These charges have almost certainlyput continuous education out of the reach of themajority of poor Tanzanians. These developments havecontributed to the growing inequality in Tanzania.The case studyApproachThis study was conducted in the areas where World VisionTanzania (WVT) implements community-based developmentprogrammes. The method was chosen to enable theresearcher to explore a single entity (in this case a singlesocial group within a single institution) and to collect detailedinformation by using a variety of data-collection procedures.Primarily, the study used in-depth interviews; data36 The Girl-Child and Government Service Provision