JAMES MATHEW MGAYA – Art in Tanzania internship

Disaster Management

Medical and Public Health

Other African countries have prioritized the pandemic and the accompanying lockdown measures that have worsened the severe food insecurity problem, increasing the population of people living in extreme poverty. At the same time, Tanzania has opted for a different approach. Though Tanzania’s unconventional approach to COVID-19 may be slow in response and seem to lack direction, its uniqueness illustrates the need for the government to form context-specific innovative containment strategies and recovery plans. The Tanzania government’s expenditure was to maintain multiple competing priorities, so far the government did not ignore the pandemic by increase public health funding. Tanzania’s interest was to contain the transmission of the virus along all its borders, coordinate closely with its partners, maintain diplomatic relationships, ensure trade is not severely disrupted, and invest in formal small-holder farmers to produce for the domestic economy.

How did it work?

Tanzania used its government expenditure to refocus on financial services, which made it among 14 African countries that did not introduce any social safety measures, such as cash transfers. Instead, the government focused on responding with some economic measures through the Bank of Tanzania with various policies to ease liquidity and safeguard the financial sector’s stability. The bank reduced the discount rate, lowered the minimum reserve requirements ratio, incentivised the restructuring of loans for severally affected borrowers, and relaxed limits on mobile money use.

Tanzanian government expenditure focused on increasing its capacity to maintain and manage the virus while pursuing sustainable economic development. In other words, Tanzania can learn to adapt and live with the virus in a way that is not detrimental to the economy but not overwhelming the health system. They fund health centres and witness the COVID-19 emergency facilities. The government also built special COVID-19 health centres to combat it and increased public health funding for local health centres to implement mass testing and enforce social distancing and sanitation measures.

Tanzanian government expenditure uses the Strategic Cities Project for Tanzania’s development objectives to facilitate the Additional Financing (AF), which enhances the development impact and sustainability of the investments financed by the original project by investing in equipment and operation and maintenance capacity for existing infrastructure and deepening local government capacity for urban management. These initiatives enable the government to maintain multiple competing priorities, managing the transmission rate while ensuring food security, creating and protecting jobs. 

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic will have short-, medium-—and long-term effects on territorial development and sub-national government functioning and finance. One risk is that many governments respond to focusing only on the short term. However, the Tanzanian government’s expenditure on longer-term priorities must be included in the immediate response measures to boost the resilience of regional socio-economic systems. Much effort of the Tanzanian government redirected to the economy’s growth during the pandemic, so substantial public investment and export earnings drove government expenditure. During this pandemic, the government’s focus and commitment have been to avoid a complete halt of economic activities. 

Resources

The International Growth Centre – COVID-19 in Tanzania: Is business as usual response enough?

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