Dr Mohammed Gharib Bilal opens the 18th Repoa Annual research workshop in Dar es Salaam

Vice President  Dr. Mohammed Gharib Bilal opening the 18th Repoa Annual Research 

Workshop in Dar es Salaam yesterday

THE Vice-President Dr Mohammed Gharib Bilal has said that Tanzania needs the existence of appropriate policy instruments, public investment and mechanism to ensure that people engage in productive economic activities.
“Our government has continued to put emphasis on policy reforms and increasing public investment aiming at eliminating barriers to progress and development,” he told participants yesterday attending a REPOA annual research workshop in Dar es Salaam.
He said that new challenges emerge continuously which need continuous thinking and innovation on effective means of addressing them.
“Our economy has remained primarily agricultural, which contribute to about 24 percent of the GDP. The sector employs about 75 percent of the national labour force, yet agricultural productivity and rural incomes remain low,” he said.
“It is equally true that access to various economic and social services are not universally similar across urban and rural areas. This is not a desirable condition for inclusive development, but it is not an easy task to resolve either,” he added.
Such condition, the Vice-President said, sets a clear argument for more proactive role of the state in economic management so that long-run outcomes of economic activities pursued by all actors, market and non-market are geared towards inclusive development.
He explained that proactive engagement of the state includes the setting of national development priorities and coordinating their implementation of which the Planning Commission has increasingly played its role in setting development priorities and framework for coordination and motoring of implementation.
“Tanzania has made enormous strides in promoting inclusive development, especially through increased access to education and health services, and in improving economic infrastructure,” he said.
However, Dr Billal said challenges remain immense and that research can play a big role in achieving a common goal.
Delivering a keynote paper on the importance of understanding stakeholder nuances in the quest for inclusive growth, the Director of Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu) in Malaysia, Datuk Chris Tan, said the key to success lies with strong leadership.
He said the quality and quantity of policy may be debated by policymakers but what’s more important is leadership to take first step towards their realisation and set the direction for the rest of the people.
“This strong directive leadership is required only in the nation’s infancy. We must give the captain of a ship, the freedom to plot the cause for the journey,” he pointed out.
Any economic success, he said, does not just happen; there must be someone fully committed to policy implementation as well as provide a room for the people to participate.
REPOA’s Executive Director Prof Samwel Wangwe said that the annual research workshop would discuss the transmission mechanism of growth to poverty reduction which seems to be constrained by low growth rate of agricultural sector, low productivity in the informal economy and increasing unemployment.
“This condition calls for renewed policy dialogue and strategies to promote inclusive economic growth and social development, exploration of the nature of policies and institutional interventions required for Tanzania to achieve high and inclusive growth as envisioned in the National Development Vision 2015,” he said.
Prof Wangwe said that the workshop theme is ‘The Quest for Inclusive Development’ and experts and distinguished scholars selected strategically both from inside and outside the country, would share their experiences of the inclusive development in different sectors of the economy.
Inclusive growth as a strategy of economic development received attention owing to a rising concern that the benefits of economic growth have not been equitably shared.
Experts say growth is inclusive when it creates economic opportunities along with ensuring equal access to them.

Apart from addressing the issue of inequality, the inclusive growth may also make poverty reduction efforts more effective by explicitly creating productive economic opportunities for the poor and vulnerable sections of the society.

The inclusive growth by encompassing the hitherto excluded population can bring in several other benefits as well to the economy, economists say.

The concept ‘Inclusion’ is seen as a process of including the excluded as agents whose participation are essential in the very design of the development process, and not simply as welfare targets of development programmes.