Challenges and prospects for professional statistical training and statistical education in Africa - Tanzanian experience

The term statistics can have different meaning to the; academia and official statisticians (economists, politicians, governments and the general public). While most of the academia, from one end, view statistics as a very rich mathematical game, the official statistician on the other end view statistics as information. This diversity has brought problems on deciding what to teach to who, where, and for what purposes. On the part of the academia, no one is allowed to pursue a statistics course if he has a bad mathematical background. For the part of the official statistics, it is emphasised that statistical knowledge is important to all people irrespective of one’s mathematical background. This paper looks at the education system of the country to find out the type of statistics that is taught at different levels in relation to the expected learning outcomes at end. The levels that are looked at are; Primary Schools Education, Ordinary Secondary School Education, Advanced Secondary School Education and Tertiary (University) Level Education. One of the major challenges that are faced by statistical training in the country is the lack of qualified teachers, while the prospect is the increased demand for statistics (data - results based management). The ever increasing need for statistics may drive governments to find means of raising the nations’ statistical literacy by training more statistical oriented teachers. The importance of statistics to the development of any society is re-emphasised. It points out that most of the societies are languishing in all sorts of underdevelopment features, such as poverty in some parts versus richness in others, because of, among other things, the lack or absence of reliable statistics. “If you cannot describe it, you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”. To turn the citizens to be statistical literate, the paper proposes type of statistics curricula that can be taught to different groups of people right from low levels of formal education to the end. The