Tanzanian universities: founding and accreditation

Part 2/6 in a series on the history of Tanzanian universities

What universities are in Tanzania and where have they come from? We started with a quick search of Wikipedia and university websites. Some of the universities listed here have multiple campuses: for simplicity we’ve just included the ‘originals’.

Here are three things that jumped out to us immediately:

• No universities were founded in the colonial era. They are all post-independence institutions (1961 onwards).
• There are two major blocks when unis were founded: in the 1960s-70s and the early 2000s (as shown by the shading)
• Quite a few of the universities that were accredited in the 2000s were originally seminaries.

That led us to asking:

• What happened around the 1970s and then in the early 2000s that saw such booms in uni education?
• Why did religious seminaries broaden out the subjects they offered? (or why were they founded so narrowly?)

Our next step is to investigate the politics and educational philosophy of those two periods…