Case Study

Tanzania

 Southern Africa Extension Unit  

Prepared by:  M. J. Mntangi

Brief description of the programme

The Southern Africa Extension Unit (saeu) is a distance education institution. Initiated as a project during the 1983 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the unit was set up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in November 1984, to serve the educational and training needs of South African youths and adults living in exile in Eastern and Southern Africa. saeu courses for the exiles focused on the foundation and secondary levels of education.

The saeu took the following three transformational steps between 1990 and 1994 to cope with the repatriation of its traditional target group

•              introduced vocational courses to the students

•       extended the courses to the returnees in South Africa; and

•       reviewed the future role of the target group to other refugees and non-refugees.

•       The Local Government Councillors’ Distance Training Programme is one radical outcome of the saeu’s transformation process.

The Local Government Councillors’ Distance Training Programme targeted 3,700 local councillors scattered throughout mainland Tanzania. The main aim of the training was to enable the councillors to carry out their functions effectively under the newly introduced political system of multi-party democracy. 

The decision to appoint the saeu to implement a distance education programme in the area of local government was prompted by the track record and the potentials of the unit in running other programmes that demanded the following features of innovative distance education institutions:

•             ability to extend services to a large target group which is also widely heterogeneous and scattered across a wide area of territory;

•             ability to deliver a quality-conscious course relatively quickly and; at minimal cost;

•          flexibility of the institution and its training packages in building a resource base for adopting the skills and course materials developed for training other groups.

Problems encountered

Planning and managing distance education

•             How to organise the training so that it could promptly reach a target group that was large, showed diverse characteristics, and was scattered over a large area of territory (four times as large as Ghana).

•             How to produce course materials that could be accepted by councillors from several political parties using an unfamiliar teaching approach.

•             How to get and maintain constant support for the main stakeholders of local government (that is, the central government, the local councils, individual councillors, professionals in the field of local government, and funding agencies); for example, how to solicit their co-operation by reviewing the project schedule against other divergent schedules and, in the light of long bureaucratic procedures observed, by some of the stakeholders.

•             How to organise a huge training project with limited financial resources.

•             How to design and make operable a learner support system making use of existing government structures.

•             How to cope with difficulties of communication in the process of co-ordination and monitoring of course progress.

Implementing quality assurance

All the challenges encountered while planning and managing distance education can be considered to re-occur under the theme of implementing quality assurance. Others include:

•             How to ensure that there will be maximum enrolment and minimal drop-outs.

•             How to organise effective learner support services.

Using and integrating media in distance learning

   

•             How to reconcile the inevitable bias on the print media and difficulties that would face councillors who are barely literate and those who cannot be easily reached by other simple media.

•             How to get optimal benefits from face-to-face tutorials without causing excessive costs to the project.

•             How the radio programmes could be utilised effectively to assist councillors; in situations in which reception was poor along the borders remote from Dar es Salaam, councillors’ initial and subsequent training could not be paced.

Instructional design and production for distance education

•              How to cope with the extreme range of educational levels of the target group (some councillors possess post-graduate level qualifications while others have barely completed primary education), as well as their wide age groups.

•             How to make the course materials adequately interesting, resourceful, and acceptable to such a diverse target group.

•             How to distribute large quantities of course materials over long distances with a relatively poor network of communication.

Learner support systems

•             How to take advantage of the benefits of face-to-face tutorials but minimise unit costs in the light of the high costs of organising councillors’ meetings.

•             How to locate study centres for face-to-face tutorials in rural councils where some wards are several hundred kilometres apart or separated by difficult physical barriers.

•             How to ensure standardised scales for assessing councillors’ assignments whereby the number of part-time tutors is large (more than 300) and their professional backgrounds differ significantly.

The two most important issues

Experiences dealing with challenges in planning and managing distance education

•             Two basic strategies were set up in order to deal effectively with the process of operation of the project and ensuring a smooth flow of information among the stakeholders. The first was the setting up of a Project Consultative and Advisory Committee and the other was to decentralise the management and training functions to the regional and district and council level.

•             All the major activities of the project planned and carried out by the implementing agency (the saeu), including course design, identification of course writers and editors, course pilot and review, support services and funding were presented to the Project Consultative and Advisory Committee for input and final approval. 

The members of the committee were drawn as follows:

•             Prime Minister’s Office, as the Ministry responsible for local government and regional administration;

•             Association of Local Authorities of Tanzania (alat);

•             Local Government Service Commission (lgsc);

•             Local Government Training Institute, Hombolo;

•             Commonwealth Local Government Forum (clgf); and

•             Southern Africa Extension Unit (saeu).

The committee was expected to meet on a quarterly basis and whenever there was an issue requiring its decision. The committee facilitated the flow of information to the relevant authorities of the government as well as to the grassroots levels, including the target group.

•              saeu played a significant role in training the trainers and co-ordinators of the programme. Trainers for this programme were located at three levels — the saeu head office, regional local government offices, and the district and council level.

As a result of the large number of trainers required (more than 300) at the regional local government and district and council levels and the extreme dispersion of their working stations across the territory, the training of trainers task was partly decentralised as a cost-cutting measure.

 

The saeu conducted short, intensive training for the regional co-ordinators in national level workshops. The regional co-odinators and tutors subsequently conducted training workshops for the council co-ordinators and tutors in their regions after reviewing with the saeu the peculiarities of their councils;

•       Management operations of the project were also decentralised on the basis of the national administrative blocks into 20 regions each co-ordinated by a regional local government officer, and 110 districts councils, each co-ordinated by a district executive director and course tutors. All the staff at regional and council levels worked on a part-time basis as project tutors as well as project co-ordinators at their own levels of operation. The district level was expected also to assist in the sustenance of the project by meeting part of the costs of the tutorial support services from the council sources.

Experiences dealing with challenges in implementing quality assurance

The following measures were taken to promote the quality of the services and materials rendered to the project:

•             accommodating a wide range of experiences in the preparation of the course materials and in the organisation of support services;

•             appreciating the special role of sensitisation and initial training in promoting enrolment, minimising drop-outs and contributing to the sustenance of the project;

•             focusing on the course materials and support services sharply onto the target group  some councillors were at an advanced age, other councillors had a poor educational background;

•             making optimum use of the pilot study — course materials and the network of support services were improved on the basis of experiences gained from the pilot study; and

•             conducting close monitoring and evaluation of progress including maintaining constant liaison with the field staff.

The following three issues illustrate the approaches taken by the saeu in promoting quality in the implementation of the project. The issues focus on experience sharing, pilot study, and sensitisation initial training — only two cases will be explained. 

Experience sharing

•       The main forum for sharing experiences in the project was during the meetings of the Consultative and Advisory Committee. Other opportunities for experience sharing were achieved during the editors and review workshops, training seminars for the regional local government officers, and training seminars for district and council level co-ordinators and tutors and the councillors.

•       Experiences from outside Tanzania were accommodated by incorporating a member of staff from the Local Government Training Institute, Mombasa-Kenya, in a workshop that reviewed drafts of the course materials in September 1995.

•       As a result of effective sensitisation, adequate inputs were made by the field staff during the pilot study. Inputs made during the pilot study provided important guidelines for improving the course materials and the support services.

Sensitisation

The processes of sensitisation and initial training were intended to achieve the following goals:

•    make the relevant people clearly aware of the project objectives and demands expected of them;

•    promote enrolment level; and

•       minimise drop-out level.

 

Sensitisation was achieved through the following means:

 

•          meetings of the Consultative Committee;

•          meeting with the relevant authorities of the local and central government;

•          presenting papers during meetings organised by the Association of Local Authorities of Tanzania (December 1995 and December 1996) and in forumsdiscussing training in local government; and

•          preparing and transmitting radio programmes.

Initial training

Initial training seminars and workshops were organised for the regional and district or council level project co-ordinators, tutors, and for the councillors in order to:

•     sensitise them on the project; and

•     give them adequate background about the course materials and the distance education approach.