Gender Equity and Fee-Free Basic Education in Tanzania

Tanzania has registered improvements in education outcomes over the last ten years. The implementation of the Fee-Free Basic Education Program (FBEP) is a key element of the government’s overall strategy to improve education outcomes and accelerate growth. Tackling gender disparities in basic education will be critical to the success of FBEP. In recent years, Tanzania has eliminated many of the gender gaps associated with education access. However, large gender gaps in learning outcomes start in primary and get wider over the course of secondary school. The aim of this note is to identify the underlying causes of gender disparities in secondary education and identify promising policy options to tackle them. It shows that addressing gender disparities in education is crucial to the success of FBEP and more broadly to national development goals. This note is part of a series that looks at the implications of Tanzania’s Fee-Free Basic Education Program (FBEP). Its focus is primarily on secondary education because separate analytical work on early childhood is currently being undertaken and a separate note is analyzing the trends and determinants of learning outcomes in primary education. This note is arranged as follows: Section 2 briefly outlines the benefits of extending access to basic education; Section 3 describes the characteristics of gender disparities in secondary education; Section 4 identifies the factors that drive gender differences in outcomes, and Section 5 reviews the evidence on interventions capable of narrowing gender disparities. The final section concludes by arguing that narrowing gender differences in education outcomes needs a multidimensional approach.