AS the new government under President John Magufuli is working tirelessly to make Tanzania a middle income country by 2020, a new report on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) launched provides a roadmap towards that goal.
The report, prepared by the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), provides a clear
roadmap on transforming rural economies, which is a key to eradicating
poverty.
Speaking during the launch in Dar es
Salaam, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Country
Director, Ms Awa Dabo, said the new report presents a clear plan to
address pertinent challenges to development facing LDCss, including
Tanzania.
“The insights provided in the report are
important, supporting the government of Tanzania in developing its
second five-year development plan for the Mainland part and successor
strategy for Mkuza II,” she explained.
Ms Dabo added that the report also
provides a model for revolution in the development agenda, as nations
are transforming from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the
much more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at ending
poverty by 2030.
As more than two thirds of the people in
the LDCs live in rural areas, where poverty is twice as widespread as
in towns and cities, the report indicates that achieving the goal of
eradicating poverty will require a doubling of the estimated income per
person in the poorest households in the world in just 15 years, which
has been stagnating for between 20 to 30 years.
LDCs’ governments needs to focus on
rural infrastructure to provide access to water, sanitation,
electricity, education, transport and markets, as well as improving
agriculture. Ms Dabo said the 2011/12 Household Budget survey in
Tanzania shows that spatial exclusion was high mainly due to regional
disparities and inequality between rural and urban areas.
The rural parts of the regions have not
received an equitable share of benefits from the country’s economic
growth compared to urban areas and poverty,” she noted. The poverty
incidence in rural areas is at 33.3 per cent compared to urban area’s
poverty incidence of 21.7 per cent, “this is why the LDCs report 2015
focuses on transforming rural economies.
Mr Jerome Buretta from the Ministry of
Finance, representing the Permanent Secretary (PS), said the government
has received the report and will work on recommendations provided - as
the government is focused on ensuring that Tanzania attains the middle
income status by 2020.
“We have all seen the speed at which the
Fifth Phase Government is executing its duties and ensuring increased
domestic revenue. This is a clear indication that the new government is
focused on taking the nation to middle income status by 2020.
All we ask is that donors should respect
their commitment to LDCs, so this goal can be achieved,” Mr Buretta
noted. Mr Buretta called on the donors to honour their commitment of
providing a 0.7 per cent of their income to LDCs, which is also
contained in the UNCTAD LDC Report 2015.
While presenting the report yesterday at
the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Centre, Dr Oswald
Mashindano, a research associate with Economic and Social Research
Foundation (ESRF), highlighted important steps that the government could
take in applying the recommendations to eradicate poverty.
These include implementing agriculture
rural based industries that would provide direct markets to rural
people, improve tax regime which has a lot of loopholes, to maximise
revenue to finance development projects and empower local governments to
make important decisions on behalf of their rural people but must also
be held accountable for those decisions.
There are forty-eight countries
currently designated by the UN as LDCs, including Afghanistan, Angola,
Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, the Central
African Republic, Chad, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC), Djibouti and Equatorial Guinea.
Others are Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia,
Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, the Lao People’s Democratic
Republic, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania,
Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, the Niger and Rwanda.
The rest are Sao Tome and Principe,
Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, the Sudan,
Timor-Leste, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, Tanzania, Vanuatu, Yemen and Zambia
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