Lack of Education Funding is Worldwide
In my previous blog posts, I mainly discussed the issues with the US in mind, as it is the country which I reside in and thus most relevant to me. But that doesn’t mean students in other countries, especially third-world country’s students doesn’t deserve their fair share of a good education.
In this post, I will divert a bit from the US and focus on another country. An research article I found, “The Paradox of Financing Public Higher Education in Tanzania and the Fate of Quality Education: The Experience of Selected Universities,” written by Samson John Mgaiwa, discusses about the issues present in Tanzania, a country in Africa, on their universities lack of funding.
The article talks about how, at the higher education level, enrollment has been increasing dramatically in recent years, but as the same time the funding to public universities has been decreasing, and their requests denied. The author states, “For example, in Tanzania, the budgetary requests of the University of Dar es Salaam, the country’s flagship university, increased from TSh 26.97 billion (US$50.62 million) in 2000/2001 to TSh 131.9 billion (US$222.82 million) in 2009/2010, an increase of 79.5%. Conversely, government approval rates declined from 82.6% to 37% during the same period.” (Mgaiwa, 2018) In other words, with the increasing enrollments of African students, the schools require more money in their budget in order to compensate for the large student body, yet they are unable to. Government has essentially diverted the money from higher education to other things. While on the surface it may seem like a good thing that enrollment to higher education is increasing, if the school can’t support the number increase and become over capacity, students and teachers alike will suffer. With less funding, public universities’ ability to provide quality education on top of extra programs to help student will diminish. The ratio of students to teachers will become horrendous.
While universities are capable of funding themselves, this is only a small percent of their total budget and rely on the government for most of their funding. The past few years of budget cuts to higher education is understandable however. Mgaiwa states, “Poor economic health and the competing needs of the country may affect the budgetary allocation to education. As a result, inadequate funds may be committed to finance higher education…” (2018) This means the government has prioritized other things over the advancements of higher education. In a developing country, besides stimulating educational growth, there are a lot of economic related issues that need to be attended to in order for the country to grow as a whole. It would make sense for there to less funding. However, this is the reason why I am interested in the topic of quality education. There must be ways to cut cost in some aspects to allow more money to funnel into education. The article goes more in-depth about how funding is distributed among the universities in Tanzania and if you are interested to read more, I have linked the source below.
This blog post was to bring attention to issues that other countries are also experiencing regarding education. It is never just a personal problem that someone is facing alone; there are always others that experiencing the same problem. In my case, it the educational system and schools from all over the world that are struggling. While my research and blog will be mainly focused on the situation within my own country, I just wanted to bring attention to what other countries are also facing, and to a much higher degree, especially for developing countries.
John Mgaiwa, S. (2018). The Paradox of Financing Public Higher Education in Tanzania and the Fate of Quality Education: The Experience of Selected Universities. SAGE Journals, 8(2). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018771729
