Cities are becoming home to a growing proportion of Africa’s children. In Tanzania, already one in four lives in an urban centre – and many more will in coming years. This study aims to provide policymakers and others with an understanding of the impact of current urbanisation trends on Tanzania’s urban poor, especially children. It suggests that cities provide an opportunity for the holistic and integrated delivery of development interventions that will address all aspects of their lives – family, school, ward and the city.
The challenges posed by urban growth continue to receive little attention from policy makers, partly due to widespread belief in an ‘urban advantage’ – the idea that compared to rural residents, city dwellers are invariably better off. Proximity and economies of scale permit cities to become engines of growth. However, for many urban children however, the notion of an unqualified ‘urban advantage’ simply does not hold true. This report explores a number of issues related to urbanisation in Tanzania including: trends towards social service decentralisation; the need to address climate change; urban poverty and marginalisation; obstacles to acquiring land and building a home; the impact of growing up in informal urban settlements on children; access to services; child labour, trafficking, violence and street life; and the participation of young people in decision-making or improved urban planning and management.
Key findings:
- The misconception that urban dwellers must invariably be better off than rural people stems partly from the tendency to equate availability of services with access to them. However, in most cities adequate facilities and quality services are distributed unequally across the urban space, concentrated in affluent areas that tend to attract the most qualified teachers, health workers and other service providers.
- National policy and programme frameworks continue to mostly target rural poverty – perceived as Tanzania’s core development challenge. Growing urban poverty, alongside urban affluence, remains mainly unnoticed and, therefore, unaddressed.
- Official statistics often obscure prevalent urban-related issues, by depicting rural and urban averages. Moreover, standard measures of poverty typically underestimate its true extent in urban settings, where families have to incur high costs to afford not only food, but also housing, schooling, health, transport and other necessities.
