Tanzania

As a way of using ICT in anti-corruption work, Spider is supporting a project called called CHANJO YA RUSHWA - Vaccination against corruption, laziness and selfishness.

The Junior ICT expert will be based at the NOC in Bunda town. Occassional traveling to Serengeti will be required when needed. The expert will help develop the critical skills of the local technicians to manage network and system administration using a hands-on participatory approach to facilitate the transfer of knowledge.

On Friday September 16 Spider hosted a screening of the documentary Broad Band Africa—The Digital Highway To Rural Tanzania, a short documentary by Rutger Rozental (NL) that focuses on the opportunities that Africans themselves see in ICT. Among attendees were representatives from Sida, KTH, Spider, civil society and students at DSV.

In conjunction with the eLearningAfrica conference, Spider held a one day workshop with a number of organizations in Tanzania, to explore possibilities for collaboration and partnership. Only half of the representatives present had heard of Spider before and no one had received funding. Spider emphasized collaboration between several organizations and underscored that Spider can only provide catalytic seed funding and that additional funding must come from other sources. The discussion was structured by Spider’s thematic areas: education, health, and democracy.

During the eLearning Africa conference in Dar es Salaam 25th-27th May 2011 Spider hosted an Umoja session (Swahili for ‘unity’) that focused on the problems faced by African youth. The session was well attended and attracted more than the 10 participants allotted by the organizers, as people came and joined the discussion during its course.

This report is the result of an empirical study that explored the use of mobile money transfer (MMT) among micro- and small-sized enterprises (MSEs) in Tanzania. A prime rationale for undertaking the study was the current lack of research on how MSEs use mobile money as most studies have focused on either households or individuals.

Tanzania has seen an increasing ICT investment and the public sector has introduced a number of ICT facilities and applications. Despite the government efforts to conduct various reform programs within the public sector, appropriate capacity in ICT management and technical skills in some areas is still insufficient to efficiently support the constantly increasing e-government initiatives.

In recent years, Tanzania has declared its commitment to embrace ICT within its public sector. Indeed, the government has made extensive efforts to keep its promise of going towards e-governance, as recent evidence shows (for instance in the National vision 2025, where ICT has been cited as a key driver of national socio-economic development); there has been a pronounced increase in investments in ICT in the public sector in particular within ministries, departments and agencies. There is a need to strengthen ICT capacity at management level of the Tanzanian public administration. A concerted effort to raise the awareness of the targeted managers would increase the yield of other investments already made in e-governance, and facilitate communication between ICT professionals and business managers.