Introduction
Till Waenbacht worked in Tanzanian villages for two months, helping to operate a development project that assisted people with AIDS. While in the village, however, he also learned about the education system in rural Tanzania. The transcript for our team's interview on education with Mr. Waenbacht is below. To jump to different questions, use the links in the sidebar on the left.
Mr. Waenbacht also answered questions regarding health, mainly in relation to HIV/AIDS, in Tanzania. You can view his answers to those questions here.
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Question #1: How do you think education plays a major role in alleviating poverty? Through education of children? Through education of adults?
Ideally you will actually try to educate everyone.
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If you are pragmatic about it, I think the best way is to start with the children. Again education and poverty or education and wealth tie in because you can’t get education for your children if you, as parents, don’t have money to feed your children so that they have to work in order to help to get the money.
So if the question then is education for children, the other question to ask is what does education mean and why does it help? And it probably helps in two areas, one thing is that if you know how to read and write and if you know how to a sort of calculate then it’s so much easier for you to make a living. If you can’t read and write then you don’t know what to do with your money basically, so that’s one element in which education helps you to earn a living.
The other thing is education in a way makes you less prone to rumours, superstition, and just basic misconceptions. For the AIDS disease, if you're educated then you know what causes AIDS and you know how to protect yourself. If you're not educated, you will continue to believe, as some people have told me, that 'if you swim in Lake Victoria and keep your boots on you will not get AIDS,' which is clearly a misconception that you can eradicate if people are educated.
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Question #2: How could we improve education in developing countries?
I think you have got to do it step by step, but again this is my experience from only one particular area [Tanzania]. The first step is that you actually have schools so that’s a question of buildings.
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The second thing is that you make sure that children actually go to school, which means you need to provide the economic framework so that they don’t have to work, and that parents can afford to send them away.
The third thing you need to do is when once you’ve got a school building and students in it, then you’ve got to get teachers in the school as well, and that’s where everything falls down. There are enough schools, primary schools in particularly in Tanzania, most of the children go to school - probably about 80% - and they sit in the classroom and yet there is no teacher, because teacher is sitting in the staff room drinking tea.
So it’s probably those three things you need to do and once you’ve done that, I think at least it’s a first step, and then you can talk about how do you train teacher, how do you make sure they become a better teacher, and so on, but you’ve got to do the basics first. Build school buildings, get the students in the school, and then make sure that the teachers are actually in the classroom.
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Question #3: So you actually have to educate the teachers?
Educate teachers, yes, and also provide the right incentive for teachers.
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At the moment, again in Tanzania, teachers aren’t very well paid and they don’t have a big incentive to teach. Because of the fact that students don’t learn anything, Tanzania tried to introduce a new system which is private tuition. Students can learn something in the afternoon, if they don’t learn anything during school time. Now the question is who can give this private tuition? And the answer is the teachers because they are the only one who can teach it. Now if you’re a teacher and if you know that you get extra money by teaching students in the afternoons, then you have no interest to teach in the mornings, so the all system collapses in a way. So the only way to solve that is to make sure that you pay teachers enough money so they actually teach.
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Question #4: Did you visit a school in Tanzania?
Yes, I’ve been to school there [in Tanzania].
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Question #5: Do they have enough desks and chairs for everyone? How is it?
Yes and no, there is a big difference between different types of school.
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The one I’ve seen, what I can say is that they are big enough, they’ve got enough rooms, enough desks and chairs, and yes, people sometimes sit in the back or sit on the window sills, but you’ve got enough space. The issue is that teachers are not always there, and they don’t have any material or teaching materials. I think once you’ve got the teacher into the classroom, that’s already a sort of a big first step, and once you’ve accomplished that you can then think about teaching materials, and by and large the infrastructure, the buildings and furniture were there.
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Question #6: Does the government help build schools?
They’ve got an interesting system if I’ve understood it correctly. It’s a system by which the government sets up schools by getting the villagers to buy into the idea of setting up schools.
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So what they’re saying is: "You tell us you want a school and you help build it, so that we understand that you are going to send your children to the school afterwards," and then the government will invest and build it for them. That’s the case for most of the primary schools and some secondary schools. On top of that you have purely private schools, and they are totally different things, but most of the schools are state schools built by the state, built by the government with the help of people from the village, and the idea again is to make sure that they don’t just put school there, but that they involve the villagers so that after, they will send their kids to the school.
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Question #7: What are the educational possibilities given in Tanzania?
When we talk about schooling in Tanzania, it mainly means primary school.
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Very few people move on to secondary schools, maximum 10%... and even fewer people move on to universities.
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Question #8: Where do people go after primary school?
Most of the people stay in the area.
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They remain in the villages and either become farmers or tailors or carpenters or shop keepers.
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Question #9: What do you think about educating developed countries about poverty?
Awareness always helps. How much it helps is a different issue.
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On a broad scale, telling everybody [about poverty] will help, because then everybody will know. What is the most important is to teach the people that make important decisions. And again, it could be at different levels, teaching somebody like you or me in case we want to spend some time in Tanzania to help there. But it could also means you teach a government minister [a high-ranking government position] so that he can make some changes at the very top level to influence where some of his countries' money goes.
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Question #10: Do you think it is important to educate girls in developing countries?
The problem is that in these countries, it is mostly the boys that are sent to schools and not the girls.
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Well that works for that particular boy. However when he grows old, he does not usually teach his children. If you teach girls, not only you make sure they are educated for their life, but they will educate their children afterwards. You educate one girl, and that girl will educate five more. You educate one boy and that’ s it.
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Sources
Waenbacht, Till. Personal Interview. 4 December 2005.
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