Evolution of Child Health Interventions in Tanzania

This project examines the evolution of public health interventions which households, communities, states and Christian Missions devised to improve the welfare and survival of children in Tanzania from the late pre-colonial period in the 1850s to 2010. Child mortality has historically been one of the major public health concerns in Tanzania. Early missionaries and explorers who visited many parts of Tanzania during the second half of the 19th century reported high deaths of children. German colonial officials declared infant mortality as a critical problem and made efforts to address it without much success throughout the 1890s and early 1900s. Demographic surveys taken by the British colonial state in the early 1920s in colonial Tanzania reinforced claims about high infant mortality in which many infants died in the first two years of life. The British mounted programs to educate mothers on infant welfare as a solution to this program. The program yielded little return by the end of British colonialism in 1961. Although the post-colonial government in Tanzania has registered a modest success in improving the survival of children in the past fifty years, challenges persists and preventable as well as treatable diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, and neonatal conditions continue to claim the lives of children.