STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA, HIS EXCELLENCY BENJAMIN WILLIAM MKAPA, AT THE WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON SCALING UP POVERTY REDUCTION, SHANGHAI INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION CENTRE, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA, 26^TH MAY 2004

Chairperson;

Your Excellencies;

Ladies and Gentlemen:

A few days ago I read, in a recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement, of London, a poem by Evan Rail, simply entitled, “Afterwards”:

We hear the sound of drills and jackhammers,

the distant sirens over flames and wind,

the large engines, the gasses left behind.

Besides our dream there is no souvenir.

Whether we wake or sleep is only told

by the strangeness relative from now to then

and everything’s been strange from start to end.

Who would calm us, or call our visions old

as cave paintings, cave shadows, overheard

legends? You’re right. But tell us afterwards.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Post-colonial Africa has been the crucible of many development experiments—our own experiments and those from outside. Afterwards, everyone is wiser, and Africa is left holding the pail of blame and shame. We are told how hollow and ephemeral the sounds of our drills and jackhammers were. We are reminded of the obnoxious gasses left behind by our large engines. Yet, we cannot forget the dreams we had then, even when we have no souvenirs to show our children’s children. Can visions really be old? Maybe. But, please tell us afterwards. For, afterwards, we are all wiser.

Scaling up Requires Open Minds:

Chairperson:

This workshop looks backwards for inspiration. When it looks forward, it does so with determination. I am here to look forward with you, and to commit myself to a learning process for scaling up poverty reduction in Tanzania. The question is not whether to scale up poverty reduction; but how, and with what. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the minimum conditions necessary for a morally tolerable human existence and condition. We can not aspire for anything less and still call ourselves humane and civilised.

This workshop allows us to search for practical, tested, workable and successful initiatives in the economic South. There is no better place to begin the search than in this great country hosting us, with its amazing economic performance that has lifted millions out of poverty. We did not come to Shanghai with the baggage of dogma. We have come to search for what works, and what produces results. Tanzania is eager to learn, and I am honoured that in some areas others have found our own experience worthy of emulation.

Tanzania’s Experience:

In Tanzania, we are building on the solid progress that has been made in restoring macroeconomic stability to accelerate access to primary education. Gross primary school enrolment jumped from 77.6 percent in 2000 to 105.2 percent in 2003. Net primary school enrolment increased from 58.8 percent to 88.5 percent. Almost 32,000 new classrooms were built in the first 2 years only. Thousands of new teachers have been recruited and old ones retrained. The pass rate has jumped from 19.3 percent in 1999 to 40.1 percent in 2003. Access has improved; quality has improved; community level ownership and capacity building has been built; and institutional arrangements at all levels have been strengthened. Challenges remain, but we believe we can attain universal primary education, with gender balance, over the next three years, and realise this MDG goal 8 years ahead of schedule.

This success was made possible by the following combination of initiatives: we abolished school fees in 2001; we obtained debt relief in 2001; we increased our own education budget; there was increased bilateral donor support with more coherence, coordination and harmonisation; there was greater national ownership of the Primary Education Development Plan; we received USD 150 million World Bank credit; and there was a very high level of community level ownership and participation.

We will now redouble our efforts to improve access to secondary and tertiary education, as well as other social services, especially in the areas of potable water and child and maternal health. More effort will be put to combat HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, and to protect the environment. A social and economic infrastructure to facilitate and service a market economy is a pressing imperative.

The Tanzanian economy has attained an annual growth rate averaging 5-6 percent annually since the second half of the 1990s. Indicators of income poverty have declined steadily. Nevertheless, at about 35 percent and 19 percent, the proportion of Tanzanians that are, respectively, deemed “basic needs poor” and “food poor”, remains high. We are determined that our economy should grow at a much higher rate to enable us meet all the MDGs.

Pending the pickup in growth, together with our development partners, we must continue to provide effective safety nets for the large pool of vulnerable groups, including those arising from the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS. In keeping with the character of community-driven development projects, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) has empowered many poor people in our country by involving them in the design, implementation, and monitoring of many social and economic projects of their choice. In the process, thousands of vulnerable persons, men and women, have also been able to earn much needed incomes.

We are working closely with the World Bank to strengthen primary and secondary school education in Tanzania, and to bolster the transition rate from primary to secondary schools by more than seven-fold to 50 percent in five years. Concurrently, the transition rate from secondary school to university is expected to increase over eight-fold to 25 percent. To address income poverty, we will focus on those sectors that generate substantial income and employment for the poor as well as easing the transition from the informal to the formal sector.

The Imperative of a Global Compact:

To succeed, however, there must be robust, targeted and comprehensive interventions to give a fillip to human development, encompassing all the 8 MDGs, thereby scaling up poverty reduction. These interventions include those undertaken by African governments under NePAD on the one hand, and those commitments made by rich industrialised countries over the last 30 years, culminating in the Monterrey Consensus. New initiatives are needed, and Gordon Brown’s initiative for an International Finance Facility (IFF) deserves the full support of everyone. As no one else has come up with a better alternative, we have to support Gordon Brown. Countries that have met all the reasonable conditions for support and growth should not be constrained for lack of financial and technical resources. With political will, the world can provide these resources.

New approaches, based on best practices in developing countries and in our development partners, must be identified, developed and applied more broadly. These include ownership, partnership, participation, accountability, policy and administrative coordination and coherence, predictability of policies and resource flows, and everything else agreed upon in the Rome Consensus. Tanzania’s experience in ownership, aid coordination and harmonization is available for the consideration of others.

Africa today has generally committed itself to meeting its part of the Global Compact implied in NEPAD. But often the real question is not one of political will, as of capacity to deliver. The unbearable debt burden hamstrings government capacity to deliver. More robust initiatives to address the question of debt are necessary. At the very minimum new funding must not be debt-creating.

Massive interventions with care and treatment plans for AIDS sufferers and HIV positive people are necessary where health delivery capacity exists. And where such infrastructural capacity does not exist, it can, and should be built. Mother to child viral transmission can, and should be cut down. HIV positive skilled workers—teachers, nurses, civil servants—can and must be helped to live as long as possible, and work as long as possible. HIV positive parents can and must live and work long enough to see their children through school, reducing the number of orphans and health costs in the process. Prevention is important, but I must keep the infected ones alive if I am to sustain everything else we are doing. In all interventions, we have to listen more to African people—their leaders and their scientists.

Strong States are Necessary:

Chairperson:

The implosion of some nation-states, and the emergence of the so-called “failed states”, has created a fertile ground for terrorism and other forms of cross-border crime. The standard prescription of more democracy alone will not do when people are impoverished, hungry and angry. Neither will massive military intervention. Long-term positive engagement, rather than quick fixes, is the better approach.

There cannot be market economies without the infrastructure of the market. Weak regulatory capacity leads to chaotic markets that are of no benefit to the ordinary person. Commodity prices on which any hope of poverty reduction in Africa depends keep on fluctuating widely. One example, out of many, is the economy of Rombo District in Tanzania, which for years depended on coffee, and which has now declined drastically. People in that district who never knew abject poverty now do. Reforming democratic African countries are increasingly under pressure to show that open markets work for all, and are better than planned ones.

Democracy and open markets will only be accepted for what they deliver, not for what they promise. There must be sufficient benefits to the ordinary people, in terms of poverty reduction, to build and sustain wide political support for the reforms we have to promote.

The market economy must not mean the dilution of the state. Our experience in developing and transition economies shows that a strong state is an important anchor of political and economic reforms and stability. The state, therefore, needs to be strengthened, not weakened; empowered not enfeebled.

Ownership and Participation

Chairperson:

National and local ownership of the development initiative and agenda is necessary if we are to scale up poverty reduction efforts, and sustain them. And ownership must be dovetailed with participation. There can be no ownership without participation.

Ownership must also devolve down to the level of communities. Local government reform must address the hitherto power asymmetry between central governments and the people, and build local capacity to judiciously assume new powers. And the culture of the communities must underpin such ownership, participation and development initiatives.

Culture is Important:

Traditional African societies eschew hyped individualism. We are communities more than individuals. The community is the psychological and security anchor of an inner peace that comes from belonging to a larger entity than the self and immediate family. This social asset has to be captured in intellectual discourse about theories of development. For, without the sense of community, of belonging, that characterizes rural African life, it would have been very difficult to push the ownership and participation agenda. Working together and cooperatively is the African way. With an infusion of external support, it can create remarkable results. Development partnerships must not undermine our cultural values.

We all applaud our hosts, the People’s Republic of China, for their spectacular progress in fighting poverty. We must, in the same breath, concede that part of this success derives from their cultural heritage, and their insistence to carry out reforms always with Chinese characteristics.

In all kinds of wars, one has to fight with the weapons in one’s hands. To quench the thirst of development one has to drop the bucket where one is. This lies at the heart of the concepts of ownership—ownership not only of development initiatives and strategies, but also of resources and of the will to develop.

Measuring Poverty:

Chairperson:

In measuring poverty, like in prescribing solutions to it, one size cannot fit all. How we measure poverty cannot be divorced from its context in terms of socio-economic environment, cultural values, and structure of the economy. Frankly, the 1 USD a day yardstick used all over the world does not make much sense to the people in rural Tanzania. To them money is, by all means, important; but it is not everything by which they measure their status in society and evaluate the composite of their well-being. There are certainly times when to them cultural affinity, and the social safety nets that the extended family and clan provide can be considered more important and relevant than money or other forms of material wealth.

Conclusion:

Chairperson:

Scaling up poverty reduction will require follow-up efforts, beyond Shanghai, to continue to identify valuable experiences in the South, and to bring them to the attention of other countries. This can be done through workshops such as this one, and by opening effective channels of South-South cooperation, including through technical assistance, based on proven experiences. Scaling up entails new challenges: to adopt and adapt; to innovate with proven and sometimes untried approaches; to minimize pre-specification of programmes and to create space for policy innovation.

I thank our hosts, the People and Government of the People’s Republic of China, for extending to us exceptionally warm hospitality. We, in Tanzania, are ever grateful for decades of beneficial and uninterrupted bilateral relationship, all-weather friendship, cooperation and solidarity with this great country.

I thank our good friend, Jim Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, for his shining leadership in the global fight against poverty. We welcome, with gratitude, his initiative to organize this workshop.

I thank all the World Bank staff, national experts and officials who have worked so hard to generate valuable background ideas, information and documentation for this Workshop.

Chairperson:

Let me conclude with a recap of my main messages today:

1. Scaling up poverty reduction requires open minds on all sides. There are no elixirs.

2. The MDGs are the minimum conditions necessary for a morally tolerable human existence. Countries on the right path must not be delayed for lack of resources.

3. Reforming democratic African Governments need greater support to show their people that open markets work for all.

4. Debt relief must be broader, deeper and faster. New funding must not be debt-creating.

5. Robust interventions in HIV/AIDS care and treatment are necessary and urgent.

6. Democracy and open markets will only be embraced for what they deliver, not for what they promise. Strong states are necessary.

7. Local culture and knowledge plays a key role, which must be recognised.

8. The external environment must reward fairly exporters of primary commodities.

9. We must go for practical, tested and successful initiatives in the economic South, and best practices in aid delivery from the donor community.

10. Best practices include: ownership, partnership, participation, accountability, policy and administrative coordination and coherence, predictability of policies and resource flows, and the Rome Consensus.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Our hosts, the Chinese, have a proverb: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” I have sung a lot today not because I have all answers to scaling up poverty reduction. I sang because I have experiences and thoughts to share. Together our experiences and thoughts can fast-track the global war on poverty.

I thank you for your kind attention.