The Challenges Facing Poverty Reduction Programmes in Tanzania.

Abstract

his study sought to examine challenges of poverty reduction programmes in Longido District. It specifically identify the poverty reduction programmes implementation by TASAF, to find out the challenges faced in the implementation of TASAF programmes and to explore the views of stakeholders on how the challenges experienced can be addressed. There have been number of efforts by the government, local and international agencies alongside Non-Governmental Organisations towards poverty reduction in Tanzania. Despite initiatives and achievements made by TASAF in reducing income poverty, there are still some challenges in the implementation of the set programmes. Several studies have been carried out which show TASAF success towards poverty reduction. For instance, Nkala (2013) assessed the impact of Tanzania social action fund on vulnerable household’s poverty reduction in Kigoma District Council, Komba (2015) studied the spatial diversity of households’ participation in poverty reduction programmes in Tanzania: a case of Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF). Despite the fact that these studies have contributed to the understanding the implementation of TASAF, they did not provide detailed information on the challenges faced by TASAF. The study employed mixed research approache and cross-sectional research design, whereby the data were gathered using questionnaires and interview. To ensure authenticity of the data, the stratified simple random sampling technique was used to select the TASAF beneficiaries and purposive sampling to select the TASAF officials. A total of 93 questionnaires were distributed and 85 were filled (91.3%) by TASAF beneficiaries and five (05) TASAF officials were interviewed (50%). Descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation was used to analyse quantitative data and Content analysis to analyse qualitative data (narratives). The study was conducted under maximum adherence to research ethical considerations, specifically obligation to subjects’ rights, obligation to Institute of Accountancy of Arusha guidelines on conducting research, privacy, confidentiality, participant informed consent and respect to the respondents’ rights. Findings revealed that among the projects implemented by TASAF in the study area includes; provision of TASAF grants, improvement of education infrastructures, improvement of health services, improvement of education services, household capacity building in income generation and improvement of agriculture. Also the study revealed that inadequate TASAF personnel inadequate fund, inadequate transport facilities and cultural barrier were among the challenges. Furthermore, findings indicated that participation of the community members in TASAF projects, adequate TASAF personnel, adequate transport facilities,vi and adequate fund to implement TASAF projects, improved Quality of staff, implementation of relevant projects and provision of education on the objectives of TASAF projects were suggested to be solutions to the experienced challenges. The study recommends that the government should make efforts to strengthen the implementation of TASAF projects so as to reduce poverty among the communities.