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Chapter 5 Escaping Poverty in Tanzania—What Can We Learn From Cases of Success? Kate Higgins Introduction Alleviating poverty has been at the heart of much of Tanzanian policy for decades. Between 2001 and 2004, Tanzania’s poverty reduction strategy guided povertyreductionefforts,focusingontheprioritysectorsofprimaryeducation, basic health, water and sanitation, agriculture, rural roads, the judiciary and land.1 There was broad consensus, however, that this strategy paid inadequate attention to economic growth. The subsequent strategy, the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty, widely known by its Kiswahili acronym MKUKUTA, sought to rectify this and guided Tanzania’s poverty reduction efforts between 2005 and 2010.2 During this period, a central concern among government and the policy community in Tanzania was bolstering the rate of gross domestic product (GDP), as well as ensuring that this growth was translated into welfare improvements at the household level.3 Despite a concern that the initial poverty reduction strategy paper had paid inadequate policy attention to growth, Tanzania did experience GDP growth throughout the 2000s, peaking at 7.8 per cent in 2004.4 All key sectors of the economy—agriculture, hunting and forestry, mining and quarrying, construction, fishing, manufacturing and services—grew in GDP terms, albeit to differing degrees. Critically, GDP growth in the agriculture sector did not match overall GDP growth. In addition, the contribution of agriculture to GDP declined from 29.6 per cent in 1998 to 24.0 percent in 2008.5 This compares rather awkwardly with how the employment of the population is distributed: according to the 2006 Integrated Labour Force Survey, approximately threequarters of Tanzanians are currently employed in agriculture.6 This means that the largest share of the population is getting significantly less than their proportionate share of GDP. This is one of key reasons cited for growth without commensurate levels of poverty reduction in Tanzania. Despite sustained GDP growth, with 78 TRANSLATING GROWTH INTO POVERTY REDUCTION the exception of Dar es Salaam, there was a limited decline in both food and basic needs poverty levels in mainland Tanzania between 1991/92 and 2007. Tanzania has experienced substantial growth over the past decade but this has not been accompanied by a significant reduction in poverty: between 2000/01 and 2007, the percentage of people in mainland Tanzania living below the basic needs poverty line fell only slightly, from 35.7 per cent to 33.6 per cent. Given population growth, this translated into an increase in the absolute number of people in poverty, from 11.4 million in 2000/01 to 12.9 million in 2007.7 Inacontextwheremovementoutofpovertyhasbeenlimited,thischapter examines how and why some people have experienced upward socioeconomic mobility. Specifically, it seeks to identify, based on qualitative data collected in six research sites, how and why people have experienced upward mobility and, in some cases, moved out of poverty. What can we learn from cases of success? Through systematic analysis of the qualitative dataset, this chapter argues that agriculture is a key factor in supporting upward mobility. But, critically, it is non-farm businesses, the accumulation of physical assets (such as land and housing), salaried employment and favourable marriage—some of which agriculture plays a role in supporting—which are most effective at moving people out of poverty. When it comes to moving beyond vulnerability, these findings hold. There have been some attempts to understand and elicit lessons from the relatively small proportion of households that have managed to escape poverty in Tanzania in the past decade. Most prominently, analysis of the Kagera Health and Development ten-year panel survey (1991/94–2004) compared people who escaped poverty with those stuck in poverty.8 The key finding was that movements out of poverty were enabled by the diversification of income-generating activities, both on and off the farm. More specifically, on-farm diversification was critical to income growth, and lack of it was associated with stagnation and/or declines in well-being. Diversification into non-farm activities (e.g. trading crops, having a nearby shop and owning plots of timber (tresses) was found to have strong explanatory power when it came to understanding movements out of poverty.9 Importantly, with the exception of those in remote villages, this route out of poverty was not found to be dependent on physical capital but rather on good health, the trust of benefactors and exposure to different, innovative ways of doing things. Education was also a key part of the story: each additional year of education was associated with significant...

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