Tanzania
Tanzania is a fast-growing economy, with growth rates above average for Sub-Saharan Africa since 2005; a stable though evolving political settlement; and robust macroeconomic performances. While two thirds of the population are still employed in the agricultural sector, initial signs of productive transformation have happened over the past few years. For example, food and beverages, some agro-business and mining manufacturing have started to gain traction in domestic and export markets, whilst creating formal employment opportunities.
Despite some encouraging results and the country’s huge growth potential, Tanzania faces multiple challenges constraining its structural transformation and overall poverty reduction. These include the dominance of trade over productive sectors; the shortage of good job opportunities and technical skills; limited productive investments and high concentration of industries in few regions; deficiencies in public service delivery and bottlenecks in key economic infrastructures such as the power sector.
In all these sectors, overlapping corruption practices and rent capture have been major structural constraints to Tanzanian development.
The dramatic acceleration in the fight against corruption by the current government since 2015 has opened an important window of opportunity for sectoral anti-corruption reforms and improved development outcomes. After painful and necessary institutional and economic shocks in the public and private sectors, Tanzania has been slowly moving towards a new stable equilibrium in its political settlement.
More critically, following the pragmatic and deal-making approach of political leadership, new forms of dialogue between the public and private sectors are gradually emerging. This provides an opportunity for researchers to document evidence of corruption and inefficiency in these sectors to help build feasible, high-impact reforms that will support development and tackle corruption.
The consolidation and sustainability of important results achieved so far calls for such sector-specific anti-corruption reforms to be embedded in institutions. These reforms can reduce the vulnerability to corruption in the public sector, deliver pragmatic solutions and tangible results, while opening new spaces for productive investments and diversification, as well as new public-private partnerships.
The achievement of these development outcomes is a critical ingredient in sustaining Tanzanian efforts along its structural transformation pathway. ACE is working towards this objective with its Tanzanian research projects and stakeholders.
Projects in Tanzania
Publications
Networks, incentives and informal payments in the Tanzanian health system: a qualitative study
Informal payments constitute one of the most persistent problems of ...
A New Approach to Anti-Corruption – When Rule-Breakers rule
This toolkit provides a step by step guide to analysing ...
Making anti-corruption real: using a ‘Power Capabilities and Interest Approach’ to stop wasting money and start making progress
Anti-corruption needs a radical rethink. After decades of effort, the ...
The Political Economy of ‘Specialism’ in Tanzania: How to make Export Processing Zones work via conditional special licensing
Industrial policies increasingly rely on the use of special regimes ...
Supply-side factors influencing informal payment for healthcare services in Tanzania
Informal payments for healthcare are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. They ...
Feasible pathways for energy transition in Tanzania: shifting unproductive subsidies towards targeted green rents
Tanzania’s energy sector is at a crossroads. After almost two ...
Breaking the impasse: aligning incentives to address corruption in Tanzania’s skills sector
Tanzania’s skills sector is characterised by significant mistrust between public ...
The political economy of the steel sector in Tanzania: power relations and patterns of decline and growth over time
The trajectory of Tanzania’s steel sector over the past 20 ...
Tanzania’s ‘rice bowl’: production success, scarcity persistence and rent seeking in the East African Community
Rice is a ‘political crop’. As the second most important ...
Designing for differences: aligning incentives in Tanzania’s skills sector
The existence of skills gaps and mismatches has been widely ...
