I ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: Ujamaa and the Egalitarian Paradox: the Correlation Between Socialism and Contemporary Public Servic
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ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: Ujamaa and the Egalitarian Paradox: The Correlation between Socialism and Contemporary Public Service Disparities Among Villages in Rural Tanzania Hannah Joelle Schneider, Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, 2021 Thesis directed by: Professor Kelly Askew Six years after independence, the government of Tanzania implemented Ujamaa, a set of socialist policies emphasizing rural development and the establishment of communal agricultural villages. In this thesis, I focus on how the continuing legacy of Ujamaa may influence the distribution of public services throughout Tanzania. This study uses data collected from interviews with village leaders and villagers in 45 villages from 2010 to 2016 to illustrate the extent of disparities in government-provided services, specifically healthcare, secondary education, and national grid electricity. Despite the end of Ujamaa in the 1980s, rural villages in Tanzania appear to have experienced general bias in government service provision, potentially based on village status during Ujamaa, as former Ujamaa villages possessed higher levels of services than villages not considered to be Ujamaa villages. Other indicators of provision bias include primary livelihood and whether a village is the ward headquarters. i Ujamaa and the Egalitarian Paradox: The Correlation between Socialism and Contemporary Public Service Disparities Among Villages in Rural Tanzania By Hannah Joelle Schneider Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the College of Literature, Science, & Arts at the University of Michigan in partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts International Studies with Honors 2021 Thesis Committee: Professor Kelly Askew Doctor Anthony Marcum ii Acknowledgements I would first like to express immense gratitude to my advisor and mentor, Professor Kelly Askew, for shaping my interest in Tanzania, its cultures, people, and lifestyles; for helping me bring to life a research project that I could not have imagined only a year ago; and for your enthusiastic support of every draft, every meeting, and the countless ideas that popped up throughout the year. To Dr. Anthony Marcum, thank you for a wonderful year of learning about what to write, how to write it, and how to find the information in the first place; for challenging me to think through every aspect of this thesis; and, of course, for your dedication to our cohort amidst a Zoom-filled year. To Linda Kimmel, thank you for walking me through every step of the data analysis and answering question after question. This thesis would quite literally not be complete without you. To the entire research team at home and abroad, thank you for your tireless dedication to the project over the past decade. Your work made this thesis possible. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their incredible support during the past year. To my mom, thank you for the daily check-ins and cheering me on despite the countless photos of page numbers and paragraphs sent multiple times a day. To my dad, thank you for asking all the questions and providing the best car ride conversations. To my sister, thank you for every poorly timed Facetime call that somehow always ended in roaring laughter (I did, in fact, enjoy every one of them). Finally, to my roommates, thank you for patiently listening as I worked through each problem that arose and for supporting me through it all, even with the unending references to my research. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii List of Tables and Figures ............................................................................................................ vi Discussion on Translations ......................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 Public Service Provision in Tanzania .......................................................................... 1 A Brief History of Ujamaa and Rural Villagization ............................................................................ 3 The Health System and Healthcare Provisioning ................................................................................ 7 Education ................................................................................................................................................. 9 Electrification ........................................................................................................................................ 11 Overview of Remaining Chapters ....................................................................................................... 13 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 13 Chapter 2 Literature Review and Methodology .......................................................................... 15 Literature Review ................................................................................................................................. 15 Methods .................................................................................................................................................. 19 Village Selection ................................................................................................................................................. 19 Village-level Data Collection and Variable Definitions ..................................................................................... 21 Quantitative and Qualitative Coding .................................................................................................................. 28 Scope....................................................................................................................................................... 29 Limitations ............................................................................................................................................. 31 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 32 Chapter 3 Implications of Ujamaa Village Status on Service Provision ................................... 34 Statistical Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 34 Ujamaa and Service Provision Hypotheses ........................................................................................ 36 Results .................................................................................................................................................... 37 Healthcare ........................................................................................................................................................... 38 Secondary Education .......................................................................................................................................... 39 Grid-Electricity ................................................................................................................................................... 39 General Service Provision .................................................................................................................................. 40 Discussion .............................................................................................................................................. 42 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 42 Chapter 4 Factors Influencing Service Provision in Ujamaa Villages ..................................... 44 Statistical Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 44 Results .................................................................................................................................................... 45 Group 1: Variables in Relation to Ujamaa Village Status .................................................................................. 45 Group 2: Factors Influencing Service Provision ................................................................................................ 46 Discussion .............................................................................................................................................. 49 Another Look into Electrification ....................................................................................................... 53 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 56 Chapter 5 Conclusions ................................................................................................................. 57 Review of Results .................................................................................................................................. 57 The Egalitarian Paradox ...................................................................................................................... 57 iv Ujamaa’s Success .................................................................................................................................. 58 Discussion of Service