Household Strengthening Approaches and Household Poverty: The Case of Selected Household Strengthening Approaches in Tanzania

Abstract

Poverty is considered to be the major reason that exposes Tanzanian Children to vulnerability; therefore, Household Economic Strengthening is considered to be the most important intervention. However, there is little understanding on the application of household economic strengthening approaches with regard to the contextual characteristics of the most vulnerable children. Therefore, this study intended to explore different types of household economic strengthening approaches and the way they are applied.  The study involved four selected cases using embedded case study design while in-depth interview and documentary review were used as data collection methods. 21 informants were involved and 24 documents were reviewed. In addition, thematic and content data analysis techniques were used to analyse the qualitative data. The findings revealed that cash transfers, and savings and lending groups are widely used to address the household poverty as compared to self-managed savings clubs and institutionally managed loans. The findings further revealed that cash transfers are used in the extremely poor households while savings and lending groups approach was not focusing on the specific household categories basing on their poverty levels. Furthermore, the household economic strengthening projects significantly depend on donors and inefficiently coordinated since they are sometimes repeatedly implemented by different agencies in the same area to the same households. In addition, the findings revealed that the household economic strengthening approach for the child-headed household was missing. Among others the study recommends that an implementation of household economic strengthening approaches should consider the poverty level of the intended household, and develop the household economic strengthening approach for the child-headed households. Furthermore, the household economic strengthening projects should be well coordinated.