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President Benjamin Mkapa has expressed deep gratitude to private providers of education in Tanzania for their solid support in building a learned Tanzanian community.
Speaking after laying the foundation stone for the Aga Khan International Academy in Dar es Salaam yesterday, the president said such institutions, religious and secular, have always been very important partners in the provision of education which was the cornerstone of the country's development and prosperity.

He particularly thanked His Highness, the Aga Khan and the Aga Khan Education Services in Tanzania for playing a crucial role in social service delivery including education and health.

The president noted that many people who benefited from education delivered by Aga Khan schools had played and would continue to play an important role in the development of the country and its governance. 'The Aga Khan family and community have a long history in the educational development of Tanzania beginning in 1896 when a community centre was established in Bagamoyo....as we were moving towards independence Aga Khan schools in Tanzania included 11 nursery schools, 52 primary schools and four secondary schools,' he explained, adding that the first Aga Khan Girls' School worldwide was established in Zanzibar in 1905.

He said his Highness' personal commitment to these issues was admirable and was to be emulated, encouraged and facilitated. The government, he pointed out, was sincerely appreciative and cherished the contribution of the private providers of social services, declaring his confidence that the next government would continue to do so such that in partnership skills and capacities necessary in a successful war on poverty could be built.

He explained that the importance of education was also affirmed in the Commission for Africa's report issued recently which diagnosed the problem of the continent as primarily one of capacities which revolves around education.

Likewise, he said, the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, recognised basic education as the fundamental human right. Mr Mkapa listed achievements recorded by the government in improving access to quality primary education, which included an increase in net enrolment in primary schools from 56 per cent in 1995 to 90.5 per cent last year. It is projected to reach 95 per cent this year.

'Primary school pass rates have increased from about 20 per cent four years ago to 49 per cent last year,' he said. But the president observed that the recorded achievement had created new and unprecedented pressure on secondary and vocational education. 'For us in Tanzania the problem is compounded by the fact that the journey to improve our enrolment in secondary and tertiary education has to begin from an extremely low level,' he noted.

He said although the government had embarked on the ambitious Secondary Education Development Programme (SEDP), which seeks to achieve a net enrolment ratio of 50 per cent by the year 2010 and increase Forms 1-1V enrolment to two million from 345,000 in 2003, the goals could not be attained without the support of private providers of education.

The academy, the third centre of excellence in a planned international network of 19 academies being established by the Aga Khan Development Network across sub-Sahara Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, will be a residential school offering pre-primary to higher secondary education benchmarked against world.