Community Awareness and Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategies in Tanzania: The Case of Mbinga District

Community participation has been recognized as an essential component of anti-poverty policies and strategies. Consistent with this, the government of Tanzania is determined to encourage bottom-up participatory planning with focus on the objectives of poverty alleviation. Despite the importance of community participation, there have been inadequate case studies documenting community participation in anti-poverty reduction strategies in Tanzania. Drawing on primary research from Mbinga District, Tanzania, this article analyses community awareness and involvement in anti-poverty programmes. In particular, it uses the ladder of citizen participation framework to discuss levels of awareness and types of participation revealed by the research, and their implications for the community-level approaches to economic development and poverty reduction