Country Comments

Tanzania is best known for its massive migration of wild animals across its plains. Endowed with incredible natural resources, and reliant on wildlife based tourism Tanzania has wisely protected 32 percent of its land area.

However the country’s rapid population growth is putting enormous strains on the environment and its resources, forcing the millions of poor rural villagers to expand agriculture and overexploit their resources and threaten biodiversity through habitat loss and poaching. (1)

Tanzania has a disastrously high total fertility rate of five children per woman. Even with net migration since the mid 1990s of 200,000 to 500,000 citizens annually, with such a high fertility the overall population growth has averaged 1 ½ million more citizens a year for the past five years. In July of 2019 President John Magufuli urged women to have more children to raise the population growth rate. That foolish endorsement will further hurt his country economically and increase levels of poverty and income equality, continue a cycle of uneducated girls, early marriage and or teen pregnancy and hasten an already ticking time bomb. (2)

(1) https://www.usaid.gov/tanzania/environment

(2) https://www.usaid.gov/tanzania/education