Abstract

Improving accountability in Tanzania is an important way in which the government and bilateral donors are looking to fight corruption in the education sector. This paper will present a snapshot of the issue of corruption in education in Tanzania, and an evaluation of the Chukua Hatua grassroots accountability programme through a Theory of Change (TOC) perspective. Chukua Hatua (CH) literally means ‘Take Action’ in Kiswahili. CH pioneered a series of pilot programs in Phase 1 of their intervention. This paper will look at the learnings about one of the educational pilot programs, where a Student Council was elected democratically, by their peers. These students were then trained to question their teachers and administrators in school about issues related to school quality, to bring about change and improvement. While they had some small success in improving teacher absenteeism and procuring more desks for their classroom, the pilot did not succeed because the students were considered too young for their opinions to be taken seriously. Also, teachers felt threatened by the students and saw it as disrespectful. As the Chukua Hatua project follows an accelerated evolution model of venture capitalist theory of change, their projects have a variation – selection - amplification cycle. This means that CH set off a variety of pilots, select the ones that work and amplify them in the next cycle. As the Student Council pilot did not work, it was removed from the Oxfam project. However,we would like to propose an alternate project, using the learnings from the Phase 1 review of CH. While this is not a proposal document, it is a recommendation with a logic model of change presented. The new project proposed will have women of the community collaborating with the students to support them in their questioning of educators. This will have a two-fold benefit: it will provide an adult voice to the students, allowing their views to be taken seriously by their teachers. It will also help empower women, who might feel that they are contributing to the improvement of school quality not only for their children, but the entire community. This takes into account the learnings from Phase 1 of CH, where spaces were needed for people to meet and mingle, and collaboration between various class groups acted as drivers of change to bring about sustainable success.