Ways to end pockets of poverty

The minister mentioned Kigoma (48.9 per cent), Geita (43.7), Kagera (39.3), Singida (38.2) and Mwanza (38.3) as the country’s poorest regions.

As for the districts, he mentioned Kakonko in Kigoma, and Biharamulo in Kagera. The irony is that the said regions are among the country’s most resourceful areas.

On the other side of the coin he placed the well to do regions - Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro, Arusha, Coast and Manyara.
Without questioning the criteria used to measure the poverty index in those regions, we believe the state of affair is attributed to three factors.

First, is the inheritance factor whereby the colonialists deliberately took initiatives to develop the areas for their own interests

and because of their preferential needs while leaving others to rot.
It is quite true that areas such as Kilimanjaro, Mbeya, Kagera, and Tanga and Dar es Salaam owe part of the present development to the colonial masters.

But it is not true that all have been developing thereafter. Tanga and Kilimanjaro, for example, had been stagnating for a number of years, while Dar es Salaam had developed faster.

Over the past decade Tanzania registered 7,159 projects worth over USD154bn (over 300trn/-), through the Investment Centre (TIC) with the potential of creating close to million jobs.

Many of the (75 per cent) projects, just like in the 1990-2000 period, were put up in the commercial capital, and as usual, Kigoma, Singida and Rukwa received little or nothing.

This therefore brings us to the second factor why this uneven development had come about - and that is the nature of the country’s policies and strategies in developing the country’s various areas and sectors.

The policies had always left investors to choose where to put their businesses instead of looking for a way of promoting areas that were backward.

Consequentially, jagged up development is all that we see today. What the government and other agents of development were required to do was to set up favourable policy guidelines and if necessary incentives for businesses that may, for example, wish to invest in the country.

For those wanting to put up projects in regions and districts that are poor, they should be given more favourable incentives to attract many to those backward areas.

And for those wishing to invest in relatively well developed areas like Dar es Salaam, the incentives and motivations should be less so that more investments will eventually find their way to poor areas.

It is sad to learn that while Tanzania topped highest in the region in terms of Foreign Direct Investment receipts from USD2,142bn in 2014 up from USD 2.31bn in 2013, the same old stories about the presence of patches of poverty still reign.

Development is a process, it has to be planned and be executed in an equitable manner. Short of that, pockets of poverty will always be there in the presence of plenty.