Will We Ever Get Back? The Derailing of Tanzanian Nutrition in the 1990s

“We Will Never Go Back”, published in 1993, tells the story of nutrition and, more generally, community-based program development in the Iringa Region of Tanzania during the 1980s, and the expansion of this effective programmatic approach to other areas of the country as the Child Survival and Development programme. Despite the impressive nature of the program, the buoyant title of the monograph proved overly optimistic. During the 1990s, the Child Survival and Development programme, and nutrition activity more generally in the country, faced an onslaught of economic decline, government wide and health sector reform, decentralised authority to ill-equipped and poorly financed district authorities, and a high proportion of distressed communities no longer able to support village workers. The result has been a serious decline in the quantity and quality of nutrition-related services in Tanzania, a stagnating of earlier declines in malnutrition, and the virtual disappearance of nutrition from the country’s policy agenda.