The State of Education in Dar es Salaam's Informal Settlements

Walk into any public primary school in Mwananyamala, Sinza, or Temeke and you will find the same scene: a single teacher managing a class of 70 or more children, sharing two or three textbooks between groups of five, in a room with broken windows and no running water.

According to Tanzania's Ministry of Education, the national pupil-to-teacher ratio is 1:50. In informal settlements, it routinely reaches 1:90 or higher. This is not a funding problem alone — it is a structural crisis that has been compounding for decades.

The consequences are stark. Studies by the Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA) in Dar es Salaam show that children in urban informal settlements perform significantly below the national average on literacy and numeracy assessments. By the time they reach Standard 6, many are reading at a Standard 3 level.

Early dropout is another compounding factor. Economic pressure pushes children — especially girls — out of school. Girls face the added risk of early marriage and teenage pregnancy, which both cause and result from educational exclusion.

At Passion Society Organization, we have seen these realities firsthand. When we began our Education for All program in 2019, we conducted a needs assessment across five schools. We found that 62% of students did not have adequate shoes for school, 74% went to school without breakfast, and 38% had missed at least two weeks of school in the past term due to inability to pay fees.

Our response has been layered: scholarships for fees, school supply kits, morning porridge programs, and after-school tutoring. We do not pretend this is a systemic fix — it is not. But while we advocate for systemic change, we refuse to let today's children wait for it.

The data matters not because it is alarming, but because it tells us where to focus. Every intervention we design is rooted in this kind of evidence-based understanding of what children in these communities actually face, day to day.