The Per Diem System

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There is a strange custom in place, not just in Tanzania, but in many other countries of the developing world - per diems (nine years of studying Latin enabled me at least to translate this, it simply means ‘per day’). But it has a much bigger meaning for the people, who receive it: The ‘per day’ thing is money and it is a fixed amount, one gets for not being in their usual workplace and doing their job. In the original sense it was meant to cover people’s expenses when travelling or attending a workshop or conference. But as these are fixed amounts and not based on the actual expenses, they mean a nice little extra to the regular income. For government employees, the rate for this is set and it even applies if someone attends a non-governmental event, i.e. a teacher going to a workshop hosted by an NGO. So the NGO ends up paying for the cost of the workshop including facilities, the hotel and food for the teacher and a per-diem for the teacher. I believe, this is about 80,000 TZS (or £ 40) per day, considering a teacher earns a painfully small salary of little more than 100,000 per month, it is quite an incentive to come to the workshop. The resulting effect is a real workshop culture with people trying to attend as many workshops as possible no matter if they are useful or relevant for them. You can’t blame them, but it’s not healthy, as it brings productivity further down, with people being at workshops instead of doing their jobs and on top of it, the workshops end up tedious, as people are often not interested in the content. Apparently the whole system was introduced by development people, all with good intention, but in practice…
Many NGOs (including Femina) are trying to move away from this system, but naturally encounter a lot of resistance and with it being a binding rule for government employees it’s even tricky to enforce in some cases.

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Photos

Tanzanian Shillings
10,000 equals GBP 5 or US$ 8