The contribution of education for self-reliance to manpower development in Tanzania — A critical appraisal

This paper is an attempt to describe the nature and scope of educational provision in Tanzania since 1967. It focusses on the implications of educational policy for the development of manpower which would be suited to the satisfaction of basic needs in rural areas.Tanzania since 1967 is reportedly attempting to implement what amounts to a basic needs strategy of development in line with the declared socialist objectives of the Government.This strategy is essentially a mixture of poverty and employment oriented strategies directed at satisfying essential human needs in areas such as health, education, safe water, housing and sanitation, and food supply as well as other requirements for a fully productive life.Although the provision of education is itself a basic need, it is also a vehicle for the production of trained manpower which is essential to the effective implementation of the basic needs strategy in the other sectors mentioned above. This paper presents preliminary and tentative impressions of the relevance of Tanzania's educational system to the Government's objective of meeting the basic needs of its people as soon as possible.The paper is divided into four sections: educational philosophy in Tanzania, educational growth and development, manpower implications and theoretical models explaining the development of educational resources in Tanzania since 1967.It concludes that, where planning has preceded political decisions, large measures of success have been achieved, but that, overall, political expediency and haste have created substantial divergences between policy and practice.     

Exploring the benefits of user education: a review of three case studies

This paper builds on Leslie Morton's vision of enabling users through education and training. It describes three different approaches to mediated training for medical students and clinicians provided by peers, juniors (i.e. medical students) and information specialists (i.e. clinical librarians) and considers the benefits to the participants. The training was provided either on a one-to-one basis or within teams in their work environments (e.g. offices, wards, team meetings). The first two projects (peer tutoring and reverse mentoring) suggest that contextualized training, using intermediaries, provides the direct benefit of cost-effective IT skill development and the indirect benefits deriving from the interactions between the trainers and the target groups. The third project, the outreach librarian study, provides evidence of both direct benefits (i.e. time saved, quality of service, skills acquired, financial savings and improved evidence-based medicine implementation) and indirect, long-term benefits relating to more social issues (e.g. perceptions of the library, clinical teams, job satisfaction and patient interactions). The general conclusion to emerge from this review of case studies is that the concept of educational benefits is very broad and that empirical studies need to look at both obvious and less obvious benefits.