Poverty

Today we are going to talk about poverty, how its measured and how Tanzania is doing on those measurements. When we talk about poverty there’s quite a few distinctions to make. There’s relative poverty (e.g. people who are struggling to make ends meet in the western world and require government assistance) and then there’s absolute poverty, where people make below $2 a day and have great difficulties surviving.

Some ways we can measure different kinds of poverty in a country are through; the Gini Index, a number that tells us the level of income inequality, the food poverty line (how many people cannot afford to buy the required food), the non food poverty line, the Human poverty index which is a UN index about the standard of living in a country, or other statistics such as the amount of people with access to clean water, plumbing, doctors and education.

That brings me to a closer look at the case of Tanzania, according to UNICEF in 2012 the per capita national income was $570 per year which is far below the $2 line of absolute poverty. Additionally Tanzania has a GINI index of 37.82 this means there is a large level of income inequality, in fact the top 10% hold over 30% of the country’s income, while the lowest make do with around 3%. The country doesn’t perform great at access to improved water resources either with a mere 53.3% and even worse on sanitation at 11.9%. Education wise things are a bit better with a literacy rate of around 75% and an enrollment rate of around 98% in primary school. However if we look at secondary school things nosedive to a mere 26%.

From these numbers we can quite clearly see that unfortunately Tanzania is quite a poor country, despite its natural resources which include gold, diamonds, tanzanite and large natural gas fields, let alone the beauty of the country and its potential for tourism. Why is that? Corruption? Are people not making full use of the potential the country has? Please tell me what you think

Sources:

Trading Economics. (2012). GINI index in Tanzania. Retrieved from tradingeconomics.com: https://tradingeconomics.com/tanzania/gini-index-wb-data.html

Unicef. (2013, December 31). Statistics Tanzania. Retrieved from unicef.org: https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/tanzania_statistics.html