For Tanzania, foreign aid part of global connections

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, Jan 4, 2010

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanznia — In 1498 a new connection was made between India and Africa when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, paused for a while in Mozambique and finally reached the land of pepper, which was the original “black gold.” When he landed in Kozhikode in India’s state of Kerala, da Gama one-upped Christopher Columbus, who had mistakenly claimed to have reached India.

The spices that drew the European explorers quickly transformed into political and military conquests. Thus, when da Gama undertook a second expedition in 1502, it was with cannons aboard a large fleet. What followed, as they say, was history. Five centuries later, “globalization,” which has its origins in those European maritime explorations, has become a household world.

The economic and cultural interconnections between peoples and countries present themselves every day. In my trip to Tanzania, these connections were evident right from the start at Dar es Salaam airport, where I was picked up by a couple from India, who came to Tanzania four years ago because of professional banking opportunities. I suppose people of Indian origin are everywhere on this planet!

They joked that the celebrations outside the airport were in my honor, and quickly followed up with the explanation that I had landed on Tanzania’s independence day. It is certainly an extraordinary achievement for Tanzania to have experienced 48 years of self-rule, without the ethnic strife that unfortunately characterizes many of its neighboring countries — Rwanda and the Congo, in particular.

Tanzania’s connections to the global economy are all around, especially with Japanese cars on the roads, and people driving and walking around with Swedish- and Korean-made cell phones. It was quite mind-boggling to read the news item that “Kuwait-based Zain Group has awarded Nokia Siemens Networks a five-year outsourcing contract to manage and upgrade its mobile networks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.” What fascinating complexities: A Kuwait-based corporation responsible for the mobile phone operations in Tanzania, awarding the contract for day-to-day management to a company whose global headquarters are in Finland!

As if such a web of global economic interconnections were not enough, it turns out that the CEO of Nokia Siemens is, you guessed it, from India!

But this is also where Tanzania’s disconnect is obvious — the absence of Tanzania-made products. As students in my introductory course find out through their assignments, we consumers in the United States rarely come across products manufactured in Tanzania or any of the other African countries.

The Tanzanian government, not unlike other countries whose policies were heavily influenced by socialist ideals, is maneuvering in many ways to reverse the old policies and integrate the country into the global economy, and has done so with moderate success. Until the Great Recession hit, Tanzania had one of the best economic growth rates in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

However, Tanzania is also plugged into the economic world in a very different way — through foreign aid. According to the Development Partners Group, which comprises 16 bilateral aid groups and five international bodies including the United Nations, “Tanzania is one of the largest recipient countries of foreign aid in sub-Sahara Africa. Approximately 35 percent of government spending is dependent on foreign aid.” Last year, official development assistance from the U.S. government alone was more than $360 million — roughly $1 million in U.S. aid per day.

A lot of the aid is theoretically aimed at reducing poverty and economic development, which is also what I hope to understand during this trip. I will be spending an overwhelming majority of my time in the southern highlands. As the commercial capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam projects an image that is not quite reflective of the country where more than a third of the country subsists at below poverty levels as defined by the Tanzanian government. Neither are the shiny new multistoried buildings in the city’s center representative of the about 80 percent of the population that lives in rural areas.

But it is a long, long way to the highlands from the Mozambique shores where Vasco da Gama landed more than 500 years ago. If I will be able to get chicken tikka masala out in the villages in those highlands, I will need no further evidence of globalization!