The motivation to write this master thesis targeting the obstacles and opportunities of public-private dialogue in Tanzania arose from the fact that public private partnerships are currently often described as the new major trend in development efforts. Therefore the opportunity to research an upcoming approach, which has not been entirely analysed in terms of its long- term effects presented a challenging master project to us.
Our specific interest has been to understand which challenges hamper the public private dialogue and thus also the following partnerships in the local levels of Tanzania. Tanzania is a highly interesting example for such an analysis as it has a very unique political landscape and furthermore some historical episodes, which remain a strong influencing factor until today. The chosen approach of the research team has been to collaborate with a company (NIRAS A/S) which has a current public private partnership project in Tanzania; Local Investment Climate in . Therefore the approach was divided in two parts. Firstly, we engaged in literature review of academic theories as well as documents describing the current situation of Tanzania’s economy and political environment. Afterwards he spend one month in Tanzania researching via interviews, surveys and field observations. This research process evolved during this time as newly found challenges and opportunities moved to the focus of attention.
The result of the thesis has been some recommendations for the improvement of the current situation. One of the main recommendations is to focus on the young entrepreneur generation rather than the old generation of current business owners. As the paper will describe in detail there are several attitude and environment reasons which suggest that a development effort focusing on this group is more efficient as well as more cost effective than the current approach which focuses on the already existing businesses. Another recommendation targets the strengthening of the private sector’s internal administrations as this has been identified as one of the main obstacles in the current public private dialogue.
With the presented analysis, the recommendations and their evaluation, we especially hope to assist the Local Investment Climate project in Tanzania. Furthermore, the paper presents a good overview for everybody interested in understanding both, the public-private partnership opportunities and challenges as well as the specific country circumstances of Tanzania which affect each development program in this country.