Poverty and Human Development Report 2009 - UNDP in Tanzania

the poverty line basket was valued using prices collected in the 2000/01 survey. At that time the
poverty line was tshs 7,253. Between 2000/01 and 2007, prices of goods and services in the
basket increased by 93%, so the poverty line in 2007 is tshs 13,998.
table 36 presents results for three standard measures for poverty:
i) poverty headcount, i.e., the percentage of the population below the poverty line;
ii) poverty gap, which takes into account how far below the poverty line a person is located;
and
iii) poverty gap squared or poverty severity which gives additional weight to people further
below the poverty line.
Between 2000/01 and 2007, all three indicators declined, but only marginally. the poverty
headcount in tanzania Mainland fell by just over 2 percentage points from 35.7% in 2000/01
to 33.6% in 2007. the reduction in headcount poverty by area of residence is even smaller:
1.2 percentage points in dar es salaam, 1.7 percentage points in other urban areas and 1.1
percentage points in rural areas. 96 Given that the poverty headcount fell only slightly while the
population continued to grow, the absolute number of poor tanzanians increased by 1.3 million
between 2000/01 and 2007. 97 With a population projected to be 38.3 million in Mainland tanzania
in 2007, the total number of poor people is estimated to be 12.9 million.
Table 36: Poverty Indicators for Tanzania Mainland
Area of
Residence
Population
share
Poverty
headcount
Chapter 2
Poverty gap Poverty gap squared
2000/01 2007 2000/01 2007 2000/01 2007 2000/01 2007
dar es salaam 5.8 7.5 17.6 16.4 4.1 4.1 1.6 1.7
other urban 13.8 17.7 25.8 24.1 7.7 7.5 3.4 3.4
rural 80.4 74.5 38.7 37.6 11.5 11.0 4.9 4.7
Tanzania
Mainland
100.0 100.0 35.7 33.6 10.6 9.9 4.5 4.3
sources: hBs 2007; hoogeveen et al., 2009
the decline in the poverty headcount is too small to be significantly different from zero at the
95% level of confidence. this holds for each of the strata and the tanzania Mainland overall,
indicating that poverty did not decline over the period. of note, the uniformly small change in
poverty rates across geographic areas from 2000/01 to 2007 contrasts with the pattern from
96 the reason why the overall poverty headcount falls by more than the fall in each of the residence strata is due to
the increase in the share of the population that resides in urban areas. some of this increase is due to population
increases and migration from rural to urban areas, but some of it is due to the use of different sampling frames
by the two household budget surveys. had the population weights in 2000/01 been more in line with the 2002
census then the decline in poverty would have been approximately half a percentage point less.
97 Based on population projections in economic survey 2007 (table 33) (MofeA, 2008a). for 2000/01 the
average was taken of the population in 2000 and 2001.
147