Improvement and change in rural Tanzania

ABSTRACT

The reviewed book is a collection of studies of rural villages in Tanzania over periods of 20 years or more. Many of the villages changed dramatically in that period, and many of the villagers were able to improve their lives. However, the ways that assets in rural areas are treated in both Household Budget Surveys and GDP figures does not fully reflect these changes, leading, all too easily, to underestimations of the potentials for improvement in villages such as these in rural Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Tanzania
• villages
• prosperity
• assets
• longitudinal studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The decline in production of coffee is recorded in the village on Mount Meru studied by Noe, Howland and Brockington – but the farmers managed to find new crops and most of the women interviewed were relieved not to have to undertake the drudgery associated with coffee or to have to walk long distances to find grass to feed stall-fed cattle. This chapter, pp.154–176, provides important insights into women’s attitudes to small-scale agriculture.

2 It can be read alongside the work of Thomas Jayne and his associates (2016) who have shown that in a number of African countries, including Tanzania, there is unprecedented investment in rural areas by people living in cities who have made money as civil servants or company employees and decided to invest it in rural villages – often a form of internal land-grabbing far more significant than the attempts of foreign companies to grow biofuels or other crops.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Coulson

Andrew Coulson was employed in the Ministry of Agriculture in Dar es Salaam from 1967 to 1971 and lectured at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1972 to ’76. During this time, his first article on Tanzanian agriculture was published in ROAPE (Coulson 1975). His book Tanzania: a political economy­ was published in 1982, with a second edition in 2013. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge for this work (Coulson 2013 [1982]). He maintains his links with the University of Birmingham, England, where he was employed from 1984 till he retired in 2010.