School readiness and home environments: comparison study of naturalized citizens and majority groups in Tanzania

For more than six decades, Tanzania has been hosting more than three million refugees, of whom more than 300,000 have been naturalized as citizens. Traditionally, there have been learning and developmental disparities between children from refugee backgrounds and those from local majority communities. This study compared the school preparedness of children from self-settled and in-settlement naturalized citizens with that of children from urban and rural majority groups in Tanzania. Four hundred pre-primary children, aged between 57 and 68 months, were randomly selected to undertake a contextualized version of the Bracken’s Basic Concept Scale-Receptive. Further, 120 parents were recruited–30 from each community group. Findings indicated that children of self-settled naturalized citizens were as well prepared as urban children and substantially more than of those from the rural majority group. Parents’ practices, beliefs and expectations were possible factors in the better school readiness of children from this group. Parents from this group considered education for their children as essential for upward social mobility. These findings draw attention to the importance of the developmental and learning potential of children from minority and disadvantaged groups.