Word: tanzania
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Your story on the involvement of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Tanzania incorrectly suggested that IMF advice destroys social safety nets [WORLD, April 24]. For more than a decade, social spending has increased faster in poor countries with IMF programs than in those without; so has economic growth...
...Tanzania, school enrollment, far from falling a third since 1993, has changed little. And the inflow of new aid, which far exceeds external debt service, is helping Tanzania boost its spending on essential social services. You asserted that the poor in Tanzania and in Africa generally were "hammered" by poor policy advice from the IMF. Not so. The reforms of recent years are helping farmers to sell their crops again, schools to have proper textbooks and hospitals to have the drugs they need...
Consider a country that the IMF and World Bank regard as a success: Tanzania, the vast East African nation that is among the poorest places in the world. Best known to Americans for Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti Plain, it has been stable and relatively peaceful since it gained independence in 1961. For two decades, it steered a course of self-reliant socialism--a one-party government controlled the economy, taxed mightily and spent lavishly; its literacy rate was among the highest in Africa. But by the mid-1980s, Tanzania's economy was flat-lining, with hyperinflation, huge budget...
...With Tanzania's debt from IMF, World Bank and other loans now at $6.4 billion, the government has been spending 40% of its annual revenue on interest payments--more than it spends on health and education combined. Even the poorest families are subjected to "cost sharing"--paying fees for basic health care and even elementary school. In response, 70% of the people consult faith healers (this in a country with an HIV epidemic), and school enrollment has fallen from 93% in 1993 to 66% today. "The data are very clear," says I.F. Shao, director of the Institute of Development Studies...
...country to which they returned was a wasteland. Rwanda, a landlocked nation squeezed between Tanzania and the Republic of the Congo, has always been among the most crowded countries on earth--6.7 million people packed into a country the size of Vermont, not a good thing for an agrarian society whose primary economic unit is the family farm. The overpopulation is among the first things a visitor notices--and it has been cited as a sociological cause for the genocide. Rwanda is one of those countries, like India, where you are almost never out of sight of another human being...