'Tanzania focused to morph into middle-income country by 2025'

BY THE GUARDIAN REPORTER

Zanzibar's second Vice President, Seif Ali Iddi.

Zanzibar's second Vice President, Seif Ali Iddi has reiterated that Tanzania has its vision set high to graduate to a middle-income country by 2025.

Iddi was speaking at the opening of a three-day International Conference on Social Protection which began in Arusha yesterday.

“The government has adopted social protection as a key strategy for achieving Tanzania’s growth and development vision. This particular conference aims at ensuring that the vision develops practical measures of a national collaboration to address poverty and vulnerability and making growth more sustainable and inclusive,” he said in a statement that circulated in the media yesterday.
He said the government wants to ensure that its citizens, including the poorest and the weakest develop their capacities to realise their rights and make Tanzania stronger and a more equal society.

“Addressing the needs of children especially their nutrition, health and education is vital to helping them grow into happy, productive adults and escape from the inter-generational poverty trap,” he said.

He noted that collaboration among social protection programmes like TASAF, Community Health Fund and social service delivery ministries of education, health, and water is critical to address the demand and the supply aspects of bottlenecks to development for all, “…and I am glad to note that the conference’s agenda aims at strengthening this link.”

However, he noted that collecting up-to-date and comprehensive social protection/security coverage statistics for Africa including Tanzania remains a challenge.

He said the available data underscore three fundamental requirements including improving governance and administrative capacity to enhance coverage for ostensibly already covered populations; amending legislation to extend coverage under existing programmes to currently uncovered populations.

Also developing and implementing new legislation introducing new, perhaps tailor-made, social protection programmes to progressively extend and improve coverage for all.

The three-day conference has been organised by the ministry of Finance, in collaboration with UNICEF, ILO, UNAIDS and the Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI) based in South Africa.

The conference aims to encourage South-South exchange of knowledge and best practices to support Tanzania’s efforts in designing policies and programmes for assisting the poor and vulnerable including women, children, the elderly, people with disabilities and the youth to achieve a basic standard of living.

The conference has brought together more than 150 participants including policy-makers, researchers and practitioners involved in the planning, design, and implementation of social protection programmes and countries like Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia, Zambia, South Sudan and Tanzania.

This marks the government’s commitment to poverty eradication and achieving growth with fairness and justice for all especially women and children.
Poverty rates are uniformly high in African countries with the lowest levels of social protection coverage. As such, widespread poverty weakens the capacity of people to pay contributions; fragile tax bases create fiscal challenges for tax-financed approaches.

The statement says, at national level, the knowledge and experience gained will support the country’s ongoing efforts to expand its Productive Social Safety Net Programme (PSSN) or TASAF III to reach about six million poorest people by mid-2015.

TASAF provides cash assistance to poor families to send their children to school and seek health care for the mother and child. It also provides income opportunities through public works projects and helps families gradually escape poverty through livelihoods and savings group support.

An inter-sectorial taskforce has been set up at the Prime Minister’s office and is mandated to present a finalised document on ‘National Social Protection Framework’ to the cabinet by the end of December 2014.

According to the statement in question, a draft of this framework will be presented by Permanent secretary-Treasury, ministry of Finance Dr Servacius Likwelile for feedback from international experts present at the conference.

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN