CSOs and the Media Take on Corruption in Tanzania

By Theo Macha, and Johanna Carstens

Rampant corruption in Tanzania affects the country's development and hits hardest people living in poor and marginalized communities. The causes for corruption run the gamut from the small salaries paid public workers to the lack of transparency in society in general.

Civil society organizations and the media can play roles as watchdogs and disseminators of information on corruption. But what if CSOs lack resources to work efficiently? What if journalists are barely trained for their jobs, poorly paid, and face insufficient legal protection? What if media owners and government officials have grown accustomed to the spoils of favoritism? In Tanzania this is the reality.

In response Pact Tanzania, with funding from USAID, held a series of organized meetings and workshops for CSOs, journalists and the media owners' association to publicize information about the severity and level of corruption in the country. These meetings were important in building cohesion among anticorruption champions across all sectors. From them emerged two parallel approaches to fighting corruption: one involving a CSO campaign to mobilize citizens to demand public accountability and transparency and the other a comprehensive program to train journalists in investigative journalism.

CSOs empower communities to fight corruption

With a grant from Pact Tanzanian, the Tanzanian NGO HakiKazi Catalyst, implemented a program to fight corruption in the health sector. Through public training events citizens were informed about the harm corruption does and about their constitutional right to quality health services at government-established rates. Citizens were also made aware of other constitutional rights that empower them to enforce good ethics in society. As one workshop participant observed: "We are from the grassroots. Due to our ignorance we have been used to blessing corruption. We need empowering workshops like this to enable us to change our mindset on ways of fighting corruption."

To help citizens to understand how decisions on public expenditures are made, HakiKazi also conducted community trainings to explain how citizens could track budget allocations in different sectors. Now citizens are beginning to hold public hearings and to demand accountability from village government leaders.

Building on the success of empowering civil society organizations and networks, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) funded Pact Tanzania to carry out an anticorruption program that focuses on community-based public expenditure tracking activities throughout Tanzania. The tracking will be carried out with the help of dozens of experienced local CSOs, such as HakiKazi Catalyst. Not only will CSOs gain experience in carrying out diagnostic survey work, but also the media will widely disseminate the findings.

Strengthening media

The second approach to combatting corruption focuses on strengthening the role of media. Pact Tanzania, under the MCA project, is collaborating with the Tanzanian chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa to implement a comprehensive curriculum to train journalists in how to conduct investigative reporting on the public expenditure tracking process and reviews. CSOs will continue to receive training in how to work with the media to expose corrupt particles as well as report on good government performance.