Tanzania’s abolition of secondary school fees: who benefited and what remains to deliver quality secondary education for all?

• In Event: Minding the gaps: with more sub-Saharan African governments introducing free secondary school education, what barriers persist for marginalized girls?

Proposal

In December 2015 the newly-elected Government of the United Republic of Tanzania introduced its Fee Free Basic Education Policy that cancelled the requirement to pay school fees at the lower secondary level. The policy aimed to free families from any fees to education for 11 years of schooling and was in line with the new commitments made by countries as part of the Sustainable Development Goals agenda to provide free basic education for all. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected by the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) Tanzania, including through the evaluation of CAMFED’s work funded by UKAID’s Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC), our paper presents evidence of the impacts of this policy and contends that, while it has brought welcome benefits, significant barriers remain in the way of girls, as well as their male counterparts, striving to complete a full cycle of quality secondary education.

With the objective of informing how the abolition of fees has affected secondary school students in Tanzania, our paper presents evidence from a wealth of information collected through CAMFED’s program in Tanzania. (CAMFED is an international non-profit organization working in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Malawi and Tanzania to tackle poverty and inequality by supporting girls to go to school and succeed, and empowering young women to step up as leaders of change.) Time-series data were gathered from CAMFED’s partner secondary schools on the numbers enrolled, split by grade and gender, those dropping out and national examination results. This data source is complemented by individual data collected using longitudinal surveys of two cohorts of over 12,000 girls and boys enrolled in 141 schools spread across 10 districts for the evaluation of CAMFED Tanzania’s GEC project. The evaluation afforded a fortuitous opportunity to survey a cohort of female and male students immediately before the abolition of secondary school fees and re-survey them 12 months later.

We examine historical trends at the school level to explore the policy’s effect in terms of enrolment, retention and examination pass rates, and how this affected male and female students differently. The data collected from students provide insights into who dropped out of school during the first year when school fees were no longer payable, with patterns identified by gender, levels and types of social and economic marginality and also levels of learning. In addition, student-level data from the first GEC cohort, tracked over two years before the abolition of school fees, allow us to examine the factors contributing to dropout that reduced and those that persisted after the abolition of fees. Qualitative data enhance this analysis by describing, for example, the pressure placed on schools through increased class sizes. The data further captures the unanticipated decline in the provision of financial and material support to schools by parents following the implementation of the policy.

The results of this analysis allow us to reflect on the support that is still needed in education systems after secondary schools become ostensibly free, particularly for the most marginalized.

Authors

• Stuart Johnson, Camfed International

• Jose Liht, Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) International

• Sandra Spence, Camfed USA