The provision, relevance and challenges of adult education in Dar es Salaam prisons, Tanzania

The study investigated on the provision, relevance and challenges of adult education in prisons in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The objectives involved to explore the views of prison officers (PO) and prisoners on the provision of adult education (AE) programmes in Tanzanian prisons; to evaluate the teaching and learning process and resources available for adult education to prisoners; to assess the relevance of adult education to prisoners and the community after the life of imprisonment and finally to establish challenges facing the provision of adult education in prisons and the possible ways to address them. The study employed mainly qualitative approach involving case study design. A total of 75 participants were involved in the study including 12 inmate prisoners, 3 exprisoners, 45 subordinate prison officers and 15 senior prison officers who were sampled purposefully and through stratified random sampling and snowballing techniques. Data were sought through interviews, questionnaires, documentary review and observation and were analysed through content analysis. The findings of the study indicated that Adult education was being provided to prisoners inside the prisons and prison officers themselves were responsible to teach all Adult education programmes including primary, secondary and vocation education, whereby university education is facilitated by Open University of Tanzania. The findings indicated various challenges like shortage of teaching and learning resources, lack of enough prison officers to teach adult education programmes, poor teaching and learning environment and lack of interactions among prisoners attaining adult education programmes. In the light of the findings, the study recommends that prison officers responsible to teach adult education should be motivated enough and provided with all required teaching resources in order to make teaching of adult education programmes in prisons very efficient and effective. Also the government through prison department is encouraged to provide certificates to prisoners attained vocation education in prisons in order to make them be recognized after imprisonment. Currently they are not given any certificate to introduce their skills.