3.3.6 Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Tanzania: Roles and Responsibilities

The ministry defined its roles and responsibilities as policy formulation, legislation, guidelines, standards, supervision, monitoring and evaluation and research. Actual implementation is done by the local authorities. Sanitation coverages (%) were given as below:

Source: DHS 2004 (TBS)

Among its achievements, the Ministry identifies the Sanitation and Hygiene Guidelines to be implemented at lower levels and the National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy 2006 – 2015 which specified the strategy objectives, activities, defined roles of stakeholders, and set the sanitation standards.

As part of the strategy Public Private Partnership (PPP) is promoted, a school health programme is implemented with the Ministry of Education, and decentralisation by devolution (DD), in which local authorities are taken as focus of development with increased sources of funding, planning and budgeting and implementation responsibility follows. As a result of the strategy villages implement their own plans with part funding from Central Government and Local Authorities.

What triggered the formulation of the strategy included national sector reforms and policies, Mkukuta (a poverty reduction and economic improvement strategy), the MDGs, disease outbreaks, active participation of NGOs, CBOs and private sector, as well as the application of participation approaches, PHAST, PRS, O and OD.

Resources for strategy implementation come from central government, local government, basket funding from donors (in a Sector Wide Approach/ SWaP), the community itself and the private sector.

Achievements to date include high latrine coverage, community ownership and commitment to community projects – sustainability, increased funding to districts and formulation of a national sanitation and hygiene steering committee.

The lessons learnt are that the strategy can succeed if it focuses on districts of stakeholders, if it integrates sanitation and hygiene into other programmes, school health programmes such as malaria, child health, if government structures are established at village level and if there is involvement and participation of the private sector, NGOs and CBOs.

As a national level project, its main challenges include rapid population growth versus sanitation and hygiene infrastructure development, growth of squatters, slums, LDW coverage in hand washing, data management, reporting and feedback mechanisms, quality of latrines despite the high coverage rates, technology (soil topography, weather etc) and slow behavioural change.

A way forward with the strategy hinges on more vigorous implementation of the sanitation and hygiene strategy, strengthening collaboration among sector players and improvement of data collection at community level.