How Aid Took Tanzania to the Classrom

When you ask Monica Julius what she wants when she graduates from primary school, she twists with shyness, smiles and says in a tiny voice: "Any job going." But by the time she grows up the 12-year-old girl in the frayed hand-me-down blue skirt, sitting with her schoolbooks in her bare home of dried mud in the village of Makulu in central Tanzania, may not be prepared to settle for any job going.

The story of how Monica went to school is a story of an Africa unfamiliar to the cynical west - of a family demanding its rights, and getting them, from a government just beginning to give its people what they ask for rather than what it thinks they need; of foreign aid donors like Britain showing enough faith in that government's promises to give it millions of pounds without insisting on its being spent on projects labelled "British".

It is a small story, but it is real, and millions of small real stories like it are happening in Tanzania. Some people there argue that now, at last, after decades in which aid meant little more than manipulative cold-war influence-buying, it has the potential to become what most people thought it as supposed to be all along: lifechanging, lifesaving help for the poorest of the poor to help themselves.

Four years ago Monica's parents died, "from a long illness", in the words of her 20-year-old aunt Mwajuma Ali, who took Monica and two other children in. She wouldn't say if it was Aids, but 10% of Tanzanians are HIV-positive.

Mwajuma, who can't read or write, wanted her dead sister's child to go to primary school, but they couldn't afford the 5,000 Tanzanian shillings - about £3.50 - the local school demanded for fees and expenses each year. Then they heard on the radio that the government was changing the rules which excluded 3 million of the poorest of the country's 7.5 million primary-age children from school. It was abolishing primary education fees and bumping up education spending; now the schools would not be allowed to turn children away.

The family is still so poor that it lives entirely on maize porridge. Sometimes there is nothing to eat at all. Monica's frayed uniform, school rucksack and shoes were paid for by a relative who sells fizzy drinks on the streets of Dares Salaam, Tanzania's biggest city. But a scholar in the house brings a pragmatic kind of hope.

"I'm happy. I'm sure our kids will get education and then maybe, later, if God wishes it, they will help their family," Mwajuma said, suckling her own youngest child in the light from the doorway.

The sudden expansion of primary education is putting a strain on school buildings, teachers and supplies. But the expansion is happening, and it is the way it is happening as much as the event itself that is remarkable. As never before, villagers and teachers are being given responsibility for school budgets. In an act of transparency unprecedented for Tanzania, the amount of money the central government is supposed to have given districts for education is being published in local newspapers.

Though Monica and tens of thousands of Dodoma children like her don't know it and probably never will, the Tanzanian government's step towards providing free universal primary education is partly financed with British aid. Of the £70m Britain is giving Tanzania this year, £45m is being put directly into Tanzania's central government budget, the only condition being that the budget is directed towards reducing poverty. Another £10 million goes to Tanzania's health budget.

Pooled cash

Once, Britain would have insisted that a Union flag waved over every pound it spent on aid. Now the cash is pooled with money from nine other mainly north-west European countries and the Tanzanians' own revenue, losing its "British" identity.

"What we're trying to do is shift the situation from governments reporting to donors to one where they're accountable to their own people," said Caroline Sergeant, head of the British Department for International Development (DfID) office in Tanzania. "People now know that they can send their children to school for free, and they know this because they've been told."

The risks of the new DfID approach are great. The old way of giving aid, as grants to specific projects determined by donors, made Tanzanians and their government passive, dependent aid junkies - but it was easier to keep track of, and control, how the money was being spent. The passionate belief of Clare Short, the minister in charge of DfID, is that when a poor country has followed the advice of rich countries by becoming more democratic and liberalising its economy - as Tanzania has done - its government and people deserve to be trusted with the responsibility of distributing aid by themselves.

There are two dangers. One is that if the aid money which is supposed to be spent on reducing poverty is pooled into the overall government budget, any reckless extravagance by that government makes it politically difficult for donors to keep giving money - as is happening now with Tanzania's decision to buy an expensive military air traffic control system.

The other is corruption. Most of the British aid money to Tanzania which isn't going straight to the government is being spent to train local officials to keep track of the aid money which is.

The benefits of the new approach have yet to show up in the painful vital statistics of Tanzania, one of the poorest coun tries in the world. Half the population earns less than the poverty benchmark of £130 a year. Almost 150 of every thousand children born do not live to see their fifth birthday. Life expectancy is 50.

But Joel Shimba, the local government executive responsible for Dodoma Rural, a vast, poor district encompassing 460,000 villagers north of the town, said the new aid approach in three simple essential areas - water, health and education - was making a difference.

"Now about 70% of people here have access to water. I can't say clean water, but at least they have access to water. With that, people's health improves. As I see it, we're seeing a real physical change from deterioration to better services in almost every aspect of our life here."

Village wells

Chenene is a village of about 2,300 people, 50 miles north of Dodoma town, off a potholed earth road. Its life was transformed when the British organisation WaterAid helped it install a water supply and wells. Previously the women walked up to 12 miles a day to fetch water.

"We'd have to wake up at five in the morning, leave for water at 11, and come back at three," said Mwadawa Kimulu, a mother of seven, filling her bucket at the well. "That's a long time for children to stay without their mother."

WaterAid pioneered the bottom-up approach to aid. The wells are Chenene's, not WaterAid's, and the village maintains them from a fund raised by each family paying a small sum - less than 2p - for every 20 buckets of water. The new wells mean less disease, because people and food are washed; stronger houses, because it is easier to make strong mud bricks with a ready water supply; and the greater dig nity that comes with being clean. At the village primary school teachers are in the first year of implementing the government's aid-backed pledge of free education for all. They want to have 450 children at school, instead of the previous 300, although there is not enough space in the small concrete school building.

Valentina Mlemeta, one of the teacher, said the money they had from the government in the first quarter of the school year - 300,000 shillings (about £220) - was more than they had previously received from parents in fees.

Alongside education, the main target of the poverty-reducing aid strategy is health. At district level, health officials told the Guardian that new money was beginning to flow. In Chenene, the picture was less clear. Simple medical advice and treatment are dispensed in a grubby concrete box of a room containing a desk, two chairs, and a metal examination table. Asked about equipment, the nurse on duty, Hadikwa Nablosi, said: "We have a thermometer. We have drugs, but not enough."

Scourge of malaria

The new wells have made a big impact on people's health, but malaria remains a scourge. Olipa Chilemela is from one of the most prosperous families in the village. Sitting in her woodsmoke-smelling dried mud parlour, lit by daylight through a glassless window covered by chain-link, with the fast shadows of laughing children racing across the walls, she shouted to make herself heard above the sound of the rain on the metal roof. "I had 11 children. Now I only have nine," she said. "The first one died while it was being born, in 1967, when I was 16. The second died of malaria in 1996. In 1996 and 1997 I lost three grandchildren to malaria."

Now she has bought mosquito nets for her children. With help from DfID, a US agency, Population Services International, is selling locally made nets at subsidised prices through dispensaries like the one at Chenene. At 2,500 shillings each, about £1.80, they are still beyond the reach of many people, but they are being taken up.

Dodoma rural district hasn't seen cholera, previously an annual occurrence, since 2000; bilharzia is reduced. "If you look at the top 10 diseases, malaria is in first place, but when you compare now with before, there are fewer people suffering," said Cuthbert Kongola, a district health official.

In Makulu, asked if anything else was getting better, apart from free education for Monica, Mwajuma Ali thought for a long time and said: "No". She said she had been told at the clinic that she should buy mosquito nets, but couldn't afford them. Yet thanks to the fizzy drinks salesman, the family has recently found the money for a bicycle. And a few hundred metres from the village, over the old red earth road a steaming new coat of black Tarmac is being laid. In the 1960s, foreigners in short-sleeved shirts came talking of "progress"; in the early 1990s, they came in suits and ties, talking of "reform". Now aid-givers and Tanzanians talk only of many small changes - more modest, more cautious, and more real.