THERE are sweeping curriculum changes and other initiatives, most tied to the 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Accordingly, experts in Tanzania’s education sector are voicing the need for extensive reforms to the Education Act of 1978.

The idea is in part to enshrine compulsory education, fee-free schooling and legally guaranteed school feeding programmes.

Drives like enabling young women falling prey to street suitors to return to school after childbirth are also being recommended for enactment.

Some experts may likely wish to insert into law issues like how tuition is regulated, a matter that has preoccupied educational administration for most of the last 40 years.

These issues came up at a recent consultative meeting for members of the Tanzania Education Network (TEN/MET), a predominant affirmation being that the existing legal framework no longer reflects the demands of modern education policy, labour market realities and child protection standards.

As is often true of several other cross-cutting issues, the principal stakeholders of a specific issue appear to wish to take hold of its social moorings, whereas its roots don’t lie in the sector per se.

So the law on education interacts with legal provisions on children and, at another level, touches the margins of how children graduate into youths and how that differs from adulthood. All that can’t be set out in the law, and thus enforced.

Laws could be viewed as pieces of legislation describing the pillars of a particular spheres of activity, how they will be legally organised or recognised.

A series of loose ends could be left for the discretion of administrators and, where that gap can breed disputes, a series of regulations is introduced.

When a regulation is at issue, the ministerial hierarchy could decide to consult and resolve the matter, with the settling of legal disputes calling for the intervention of courts or tribunals – and this often taking years to conclude or clear.

In that sense, legal frameworks often avoid trying to provide for everything and lead to a stifling atmosphere.

Even the law framers would thus likely wish that administrative echelons, more so representative organs, have a role in how legal frameworks are interpreted and rules applied on a routine basis without excessive restrictions.

One purely regulatory issue is the perennial dispute about tuition, where some delegates demanded the regulation of private tuition, ‘regulation’ in this particular case being stronger than the regulations usually provide for.

Let’s say the complaint is that some teachers use extra paid sessions to teach material that ordinarily ought to be covered during normal school hours. It would be evident that this sort of need ought to have fallen within the competence of school heads or, at the most, to have been taken up by school inspectors.

One reason for this would be the clear difficulty of drawing a line between tuition materials and what is taught in regular classes, so auxiliary parameters need to be taken up.

That would include as relates to how far classroom teaching is respected in its hours or delivery and the extent to which tuition is viewed as a moment of content divulging rather than illustration, repetition or elaboration.

Tapping into 4.6bn/- youth innovation, commercialisation fund an eye opener

IT is just about ten months since the launch of a concessional loan facility lodged with the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (Costech) to support innovators whose products and services are ready for commercialisation.

However, already concerns are being raised at various official and other levels over low uptake despite substantial government support.

Top government officials have recently been urging more youth innovators to take full advantage of the 4.6bn/- innovation commercialisation fund. However, only seven youths have accessing funding so far, with 767m/- disbursed out of the available 4.6bn/-.

There are clear signs that the response from young innovators remains slow, which risks frustrating the policy format.

The fund is jointly financed by the government and CRDB Bank, each contributing 2.3bn/-, but until now response in the form of applications for financing has been poor.

It is widely presumed that this is because products or drives meriting consideration do not come to mind each passing day, especially if the age limit is strictly defined, as opposed to innovators in general.

It is also not very clear if market-ready innovations have to be radically new ideas or they can also be adaptations of existing innovations, assuming that there will be no legal claims in case of assisted commercialisation.

It is this hard to say if youth innovators will be able to come up with substantive submissions enabling them to tap into the funds or whether the cash will be recycled later.

It has been reported that one beneficiary developed technology for testing the quality of honey and other bee products, enabling him to export over 60 tonnes of honey and wax – and generating more than 200m/- in foreign earnings.

Another is said to have set up two palm oil processing technology centres, helping to add value to agricultural produce. The commission meanwhile reports having supervised a vast pool of innovations, apparently weakened by limited capital and weak business skills.

It says so far 300 innovations have passed through various support mechanisms and are being linked with strategic partners to ensure sustainability. That is to suggest that there will be more usable applications in future, but bringing up ideas into market-penetrating business is proving difficult.

What is amiss in this stock-taking is that bringing up an idea and following it up so that it graduates into a business often has to do with real industrial or market needs such that finding out what next needs to be done has an anchor problem.

There is some sort of overlap or competition with agro-sector research organisations, where efforts to develop high-yield seed varieties take plenty of time and it is uncertain how long they will last, as pests get increasingly resilient owing to climate change.

But zealous youth innovators would normally wish to take out crop destruction genes without adversely affecting nutrition or creating fallout that some experts fear could occur. For youth innovation to take its pride of place, many such restrictions ought to be comprehensively reviewed.