This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on August 19, 2025.
Shimbo Pastory
In any organization, be it social, political, religious, etc. inasmuch as there is a form of shared consciousness and vision, there are always policies. A policy in simple words is a ‘principle of action,’ yet it is an important and indispensable player in growth and progress of every institutions.
In a broader and all-inclusive sense, these policies or principles of action are laid out in such a way that they give a firm and clear foundation and baseline to standards, values and priorities, boundaries of engagement and possibilities of growth, quality of practice and service, and fruitfulness of the shared engagement in view of progressively adding value to the future and sustenance of such organizations, both in content and in function.
It is from the policies that all sectors can envision growth. The vision of future is rooted in the shared belief and principle of action. When this is unclear, then nothing moves forward.
As a nation we have made a lot of progress in terms of integral human development since the formal independence. Presumed that we are truly free, we ought to have our common belief which, using the concept of a Brazilian educator Paul Freire, in his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) ‘conscientizes’ our principle of action, which in a simple word is called a policy.
The borrowing of this word is significant in this discourse, because it was conceptualized in an era that most nations were liberated from foreign colonial domination and handed back to native people of those Lands.
Conscientization as a foundational pedagogy as explained by the Freire Insitute entails ‘developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality, particularly the power structures and social injustices that shape it.’ ‘It involves reflecting on one’s own situation and actively engaging in actions to transform those conditions.’
This mindset is important for the rise of the once oppressed nations, and ought to be imbued in the very educational pedagogy of the mainstream system so that it is first and foremost forming persons with a growth vision of the nation given the awareness of the needs for growth and services in the people’s actual living conditions.
When policies are conscientized they become promising to the integral growth, they clearly work towards it. This is what our education policy ought to be, such that, our education does not lose value even right before our eyes. It is a shame to have a system of education that accepts failure to produce experts for both the local and global demands.
As a nation with over 70 per cent of its population being persons younger than 35 years, as per 2022 census, the biggest investment would be a functioning education policy that seeks to develop experts to first fix our problems locally.
Our system whether we acknowledge or not, has a lot of gaps. With our number of young people, resources, and other potentialities we should be able to rise as a first world country.
But this needs a well-studied knowledge bank backing a consistently functioning development policy, not just a policy based on imaginations and unfounded data. We need a policy that first acknowledges the complexity we are already in, and which suggests concrete and feasible actions to solve actual problems.
At the moment we have many graduates in the streets. It should give leaders headache, why the education given is not maximized in service amidst the widespread needs. Saying our social services system managed by the public sector has a surplus of service providers is sheer falsehood.
There can be a better strategy to make the most of the talents, skills, and professional training of young people produced through our education system.
To give political recommendations like ‘young people should employ themselves,’ or ‘young graduates are unemployable’ is unfair to them as they are mere recipients of what the system has to offer.
It is, for lack of a better word, a show of negligence to the shared vision of the nation which goes above and beyond the interests of persons, regimes, or even the short-lived political competitiveness.
Now, where does what I call ‘systemic devaluation’ come in? In my opinion education loses its value, especially in the minds of those at the receiving end, when it proves to be a liability.
Pacing at a global trend, people value time as an investment, and as such where time spent hustling in school proves to be undervalued and unrewarding, there is a high chance of devaluation of such an investment in the future generations.
This devaluation can be reversed, promisingly, through thorough and well informed conscientization of the policies, bearing in mind direct relevance to the local situations.
If we cannot produce graduates who are good enough to be employed in our country, how can they meet even the minimum requirements for the global competitiveness alongside their professional peers sparse across the globe? Not speaking about this devaluation as a problem is similar to endorsing it as a normalized state of affairs.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation. He is a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines. Website: www.shimbopastory.com
