Mahonda, Zanzibar — The physical transformation of Mahonda is undeniable. New houses with brick and corrugated iron roofs line the streets.
A gleaming roundabout marks the entrance to the village. Roads have been tarred. Shops display fresh produce. By all outward appearances, the village in North Unguja is developing.
Yet beneath this veneer of progress lies a troubling reality: approximately 300 young people in Mahonda are dropping out of school each year, and the numbers are increasing annually.
During a recent youth dialogue, participants revealed that the visible development masking the village is not reaching the families who need it most, leaving youth caught between the promise of education and the pressing demands of survival.
The session, recorded on April 12, 2026, and published on May 7, was the sixth episode of the Dira Mtaani: Vijana Wanasemaje? programme, organised by The Chanzo and Twaweza East Africa.
It exposed a fundamental disconnect between Tanzania’s development narrative and the lived experiences of youth in rural communities.
Survival first
When asked why so many young people abandon their studies, participants pointed to a single, overwhelming factor: poverty so severe that families cannot afford to feed themselves, let alone invest in education.
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“Young people drop out of school because family life at home is not good, and people struggle to meet their basic needs,” explained one participant.
“Maybe you find an elderly person whose life is difficult, or a situation where a family has certain needs but cannot meet them, and this forces them to stop going to school.”
The mechanism of dropout is painfully straightforward. Students who leave home for school return to find no food waiting for them.
Families, struggling to survive, cannot afford the contributions required for school maintenance—payments for buildings, facilities, and materials. More fundamentally, families depend on their children’s labour and potential income to survive.
“A child, instead of going to school, thinks about what the family at home will eat, what the parents will eat,” one youth observed.
“The journey to continue with studies becomes difficult. When he looks at the elderly who have been around for a long time but have nothing, he wants to study, but when he returns home, he finds nothing. No food. So instead of moving forward, he has to go back and help the parents.”
The psychological toll is equally significant. Youth who see educated adults without employment lose faith in education’s promise.
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“Young people are dropping out of school because of development,” one participant explained, capturing the bitter irony.
“There is a saying that even if you study, there is nothing you will get because you can finish school, but there is no job. Even if you go looking for work, you cannot find it.”
Development illusion?
The contradiction between visible development and persistent poverty in Mahonda raises uncomfortable questions about who benefits from infrastructure investment.
The village has experienced significant physical improvements—new housing, improved transportation networks, and commercial activity. Yet these developments have not translated into improved living standards for ordinary families, particularly youth.
“Kuna umaskini wa kutupa,” one participant stated bluntly—there is an abject poverty. This is not the poverty of underdevelopment, but rather the poverty of exclusion, where development happens around people rather than for them.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the primary employer in Mahonda—the sugar factory—offers limited and politically-determined employment opportunities, as revealed in earlier segments of the dialogue.
Without jobs, families remain trapped in poverty, and youth see no pathway out through education.
Lost potential
The annual increase in school dropouts represents a compounding loss of human potential.
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Each cohort of youth who leave school without completing their education becomes less equipped to compete for scarce jobs, more vulnerable to exploitation, and less able to break the cycle of poverty for themselves and their families.
Participants expressed aspirations despite these barriers. One young man articulated a vision of acquiring skills that would allow him to lift his family out of poverty: “If I can have a skill that I am sure will save me economically, I will take them so they don’t stay at home thinking about things that are not appropriate.”
Yet for hundreds of youth in Mahonda, such aspirations remain dreams deferred. The gap between ambition and opportunity is widening, not narrowing, as poverty forces young people to abandon education in favour of immediate survival.
