I came to Tanzania with WorldTeach for a number of reasons, but one of the primary reasons I chose WorldTeach was that as an organization it doesn’t displace local labor, and exists primarily to help fill teacher shortages in countries across the world. All nongovernmental organizations have administrative costs, and WorldTeach’s are remarkably low, given the sites across the world that is supports from the home office in the United States. Despite this, it is worth considering the overall effectiveness of the Tanzania program in light of my experiences over the last year.
First, some background: WorldTeach Tanzania volunteers pay about $6,000 to teach in Tanzania for a year. This price includes insurance, a round trip flight, in-country support (from a poorly paid Field Director), in-country transport (for and during: orientation, a mid-service conference, and an end of service conference), and training. This price is artificially low, because it is subsidized by international donors, though to what extent I don’t know. The Tanzanian government provides a standard teacher salary of $200 a month, plus housing, for each volunteer, which is basically what Tanzanian teachers receive, though some do not actually get housing.
So, the Tanzanian government gets international teachers for basically the same cost of the least qualified teachers at their schools (teachers who have been teaching longer or who have more advanced qualifications can make considerably more). While these international teachers are typically minimally qualified, I can say with some degree of confidence that even the worst volunteers are probably more engaging teachers than many of their Tanzanian counterparts. Not only do they want to be teaching in Tanzania (many Tanzanian teachers are teachers only because it is a job that pays decently), but their own experiences with education typically lead to more interactive and engaging lesson plans. And, at many of the schools volunteers are placed at, the students would not be learning whatever subject the volunteer is teaching because there are simply not enough teachers (particularly in English, Math, and the science subjects). If I was the Tanzanian Minister of Education and Vocational Training I would definitely want these volunteers, because there is very little downside to having them in schools.
The volunteers get an experience that they want, or at least an experience that they think they want. Certainly it is a big life experience, and very rewarding in many ways. Despite dealing with so many of the problems and failures of the Tanzanian school system, it has still been an amazing experience, and I would recommend it to others (though only those people with a lot of tenacity and an interest in doing something like this).
The real question is how to measure impact, and the efficacy of the money that gets spent by donors to defray volunteer costs and pay the costs of the home office in the United States. I came to Tanzanian with low expectations for the actual educational impact I would have, and higher expectations for the cross-cultural exchange, but in the end I am actually reasonably happy with my educational impact. There is only so much you can do in a year (especially when that year begins halfway through the teaching year in Tanzania), but over the last five months, especially, I think I have had a really big impact on the education of my Form I students. Most of them came into Secondary School hardly being able to say anything in English, and at the end of these five months at least 50 of them can write a pretty high quality letter, using three different tenses and a decent foundational vocabulary. This is despite the continued educational interruptions I have experienced on a regular basis. I believe my students have learned a lot, and the other students I interact with on a weekly basis have also gained a lot from my perspective, knowledge, and difference that they would not have gained from a Tanzanian teacher. Obviously I have learned a lot as well, but in the end I think the biggest impact I have had on students at my school is simply getting a chance to get to know someone so different than them, and to learn from that person about the world outside of Tanzania.
These impacts are extremely difficult (maybe even impossible) to measure, and that presents one of the big difficulties in evaluating the actual effectiveness of WorldTeach Tanzania. I think the biggest way to actually have an educational impact would be to bring volunteers to the same school and have them teach the same subject to the same group of students for all the years they are in Secondary School. Then, you could actually measure the impact in terms of test scores. However, the Tanzania program fluctuates in size every year. Last year there were about 15 (?) volunteers. This year there were 20 (not including another five that extended from the previous year), and this next year there will be only 7 (not including three people that are extending). This means that many schools (including the five schools in Ngara District that currently have volunteers) will not have new volunteers come to them. This is a shame, because three of these schools have had volunteers for the previous two years. At one school, the volunteer is the only English teacher, and her work over the past year will have less of an impact because there is nobody to continue working with her students). The same is true at my school, where it is unlikely the Form I students I have been working with will receive regular English instruction after I leave.
However, assigning a volunteer to a school is not a guarantee that the students the volunteer teachers will teach will actually be better off. Some volunteers are really bad (one volunteer this year was sent home), and some volunteers choose to leave early (the volunteer at my school before me stayed for only one semester). In those cases, the impact is not positive, not only in terms of the community perceptions of those volunteers, but also in terms of continuing a regime of educational growth over time.
In the end, I think sending volunteer teachers to schools that don’t have them is a net good, but I am not sure that WorldTeach Tanzania actually does that much good in terms of actually promoting educational development. But then again, that’s not really the goal of WorldTeach.