Tanzania Association of NGOs (TANGO)

The bedrock of this background paper is Cluster II of MKUKUTA which aims at improving the quality of life and social well-being and has two broad outcomes which are:

• Improve quality of life and social well-being, with particular focus on the poorest and most vulnerable groups and;
• Reduce Inequalities (examples: education, survival, health) across geographic income, age gender and other groups). The specific goal that this background paper seeks to address is improved health and well-being of all children and women especially vulnerable groups (PHDR 2007).

This paper touches on the latest information on indicators for health and nutrition, the prime most being data on life expectancy, which is drawn from an array of data sources. The information presented herein also includes results of current analysis of survey data reported in a number of health poverty analysis reports and indices.

This background document focuses on seeing how fruitful government efforts aimed at meeting the goal of health and the accompanying indicators has been.

The indicators being reported on in this document include but are not limited to infant mortality, under-five mortality, diphtheria, pertusis, tetanus and hepatitis B(DPTHb3) immunization coverage, proportion of under-five moderately or severely stunted (height for age) and the maternal mortality ratio.

Other indicators are proportion of births attended to by s skilled health worker, HIV prevalence among 15-24 years olds, and percentage of persons with advanced HIV infection receiving anti-retroviral (ARV) combination therapy and data of tuberculosis (TB) treatment completion rate.

Health status at the time of compilation of this paper

Although there is no clearly stated expectancy age, the House Hold Budget Index for 2008 shows that for the Mainland Tanzania, life expectancy at birth is xx years for both males and females.

See from the HBS narrations

The backdrop to the current situation is that life expectancy had stalled since the late 1990s partly due to stagnation in child mortality rates and a substantial increase in adults due to HIV/AIDS. Government efforts in action towards MKUKUTA show that insert analysis from MAIR.

Child Health:

• Infant mortality has dropped from 99% per 1000 live births to just 68 and under-five mortality dropped from 147 to 112 per 1000 live births TDHS 2004/2005 what is the case in HBS (2007/2008). N: B The major reason for the high rates is poor neonatal mortality (deaths in the first month of life), despite the improvement in neonatal over the last decade still the number of health challenge facing women during pregnancy and complication at delivery are enormous.

The reason being that despite increased tracking of neonatal deaths not much has been done to expand efforts to improve maternal health and provide essential post-natal care.

However, there are disparities in under-five mortality rates across the regions of both Tanzania Mainland and Isles. A good picture in terms of reaching the national and MDGS child health targets will require interventions which put more emphasis on the worst affected parts of the country.

An areas of improvement in child health index has been the vaccination coverage for DPTHb3 which is commonly taken as a proxy for overall performance in childhoods immunization, here statistic fro the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) for 2006 shows that DPTHb3 stands at 87% which is 2% lower than the MKUKUTA target of 87%--this makes Tanzania to be on target. However, there is need to enhance the capacity of the local governments to manage the Expanded Programme of Immunization (EPI), because information from selected district show an increase in DPTHb3 coverage since the decentralization of EPI.