Tanzania’s Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology recently presented an ambitious program to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies across all levels of the school system, from primary school to university. The Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Carolyne Nombo, outlined the plan during a workshop with key education sector stakeholders held in Dar es Salaam, emphasizing that digital transformation is now a necessity under the Tanzanian Development Vision 2050.
The initiative includes strengthening digital infrastructure in schools—internet connectivity, electronic devices, and electricity—as well as training teachers in digital pedagogy, artificial intelligence, and data management. The direction is right, but between stated intentions and the actual conditions in many Tanzanian government schools, there is still a long way to go.
The Reality That Official Statements Don’t Show
Visiting a government school in rural Tanzania, but also in urban outskirts, means confronting a reality that official statements struggle to convey: overcrowded classrooms with insufficient desks, buildings constructed decades ago without maintenance, roofs that leak during the rainy season, a lack of washrooms, and school staff living in precarious conditions, often without decent housing near remote schools. Above all, many of these schools are not connected to the electricity grid: no lights, no power outlets, no real possibility of using a computer.
Building the digital plan on fragile foundations
The question every observer asks is: how do you digitise a school that doesn’t even have desks yet?
Tanzania needs to learn the digital skills required by today’s world. But a strategy that doesn’t first address the basic structural deficiencies risks becoming mere rhetoric during international conferences.
Desks, classrooms, washrooms, teacher accommodations, and electrical connections aren’t secondary details; they’re prerequisites without which any digitalization plan will remain a fantasy or will only reach already privileged schools, further widening the educational divide.
When digitalization increases inequalities.
Tanzania is a vast and profoundly heterogeneous country. There are international and private schools equipped with computer labs, fibre optic connections, and trained teachers. At the same time, just a few hours’ drive away, there are government schools where children study outdoors because the classroom collapsed, and it still hasn’t been rebuilt.
A digitalization strategy that doesn’t include explicit mechanisms to bridge this internal divide, allocating priority resources to the most disadvantaged schools, risks accentuating existing inequalities.
A necessary but insufficient version.
Tanzania needs young people with digital skills. But more importantly, it needs young people who have completed their education in a decent school, sitting at a desk, in a covered classroom, with teachers present. No technology can make up for the lack of these basic prerequisites.
The strategy presented by Secretary Nombo is a positive sign of attention to the future. But the government’s ambitious vision must be combined with concrete and urgent responses to the daily emergencies of millions of Tanzanian students.
Tanzania’s digital future is currently being built today, brick by brick, but some bricks are still literally missing.
KISEDET’s contribution: concrete interventions in the most vulnerable schools.
KISEDET has been working alongside Tanzania’s most vulnerable communities for years to directly meet these specific needs.
In addition to providing an education to children and youth from families experiencing economic hardships, KISEDET intervenes directly in government schools with structural and material projects: supplying desks, building and renovating classrooms and staff accommodations, distributing teaching materials and mattresses for dormitories. Special attention is paid to inclusive schools, which welcome children with disabilities and often find themselves in more vulnerable conditions.
Kisedet’s activities are carried out by professionists who work every day to support the most vulnerable minors and their families.
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