How will we Reduce Poverty?

The overall plan

After talking with ordinary people and with various experts the Government has decided that three things must be done if we are serious about reducing poverty.

Set very clear national targets

Create a national economic environment which stimulates development

Stay true to the three guiding ideas

Many different people were involved in making the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. In future the Government will involve more and more people in deciding what needs to be done, in doing it, and in watching to see that things are going according to plan.

Everything in the Plan is shaped by three guiding ideas which are to:

But how can we keep a careful watch to make sure that we are going in the best direction?

The need for indicators

We need to know that our money is being well spent. This means that we have to be clear about what we are trying to do, and then we have to watch whether or not we are successful in doing it.

Earlier we saw that targets have been set for various poverty reduction activities. For each of these activities we need ‘indicators’ that we can measure to tell if we are on target or not. The Government has set up a consultative process to decide what the poverty monitoring indicators should be.

Three types of indicators

It is not easy to decide in advance what the most useful and easy to use indicators will be. A lot of flexibility has been built into the system. There are three types of indicators:

The idea is to think of easy to use and useful indicators for each of the targets that are set out in the plan. The list of indicators that have been identified so far is given in the next chapter. Note that wherever possible and relevant, the information gathered using the indicators should tell us about the difference between males and females and between rural and urban areas.

Building a system for monitoring and evaluation

A lot of time, effort and money could be wasted if the system of collecting information becomes too complicated and formalised. The task is for all the people involved to think of good indicators that can be measured easily and often.

Information about education, health and water can be collected through the existing administrative system where local government authorities send information to higher levels of government.

Some information will be collected through censuses and surveys such as through the household budget survey or the labour force survey. They may cover many topics.

Local level information can be gathered for use at the ward and village level. This will usually be collected through village registers and community interviews. Although much of the local information will be for local use it will also provide a very important way of cross checking the official statistics. It will also let the decision makers know how people, and especially the poor, view their own situations.

Many different organisations will be involved in collecting and analysing the information and then drawing out what it means in terms of policies for the future. The overall responsibility for monitoring poverty at the national level lies with the Vice President’s Office. It will work closely with the National Bureau of Statistics to feed information into the computerised Tanzania Socio-Economic Database and to make sure that everybody who wants to be involved can use and analyse the information in a coordinated way.

So we must be prepared to take up the challenge. There are still many weaknesses in Tanzania’s poverty monitoring activities and the PRSP provides a golden opportunity to build a useful and efficient system. As it says in the PRSP, “The Government intends to continue to seek fuller representation of the poor and other stakeholders in the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the poverty reduction strategy, and in subsequent revisions of the PRSP.”