Environmental Awareness and Its Influence on Sustainable Practices among Primary School Students in Tanzania: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The deterioration of the environment, partly due to the lack of public environmental awareness, is still a critical developmental issue in Tanzania. Although schooling can be a formative time for fostering environmental awareness, and sustainable practices from an early age, the extent and nature of the evidence base supporting this link and relationship in the Tanzanian context has not yet been systematically mapped. This paper describes a scoping review that was done to fill that gap. The review had two main goals; firstly to map the existing evidence on the level of environmental awareness among the primary school students in Tanzania and secondly to explore existing documented evidence about the connection between environmental awareness and sustainable practices among the primary school students in Tanzania. Twenty-five eligible sources of evidence were identified and documented through a structured search of academic databases, institutional repositories and grey literature, with a targeted second stage search conducted to fill the gaps in evidentiary needs identified at an early stage in the process. These were charted and thematically synthesized. Tanzanian primary school pupils on average have a moderate level of environmental awareness, although this varies by grade and school, and is highly dependent on the curriculum, teachers' skills, and the implementation of practical and hands-on initiatives like school gardens, tree planting, water-sanitation-and-hygiene provision and clean-up campaigns. There is also a strong suggestion that awareness that is accompanied by experiences of the community and adequate physical facilities, is most likely to lead to sustainable practice, while classroom teaching alone is not. Newly incorporated Tanzania-specific evidence significantly enhances the documented practice side of this relationship, but there are important gaps in the evidence, such as a lack of longitudinal and quantitative primary school-specific studies, and limited direct measurement of the mediating role of family/community context. The following implications for curriculum policy, teacher development and future primary research, and placing the Tanzanian results in the broader literature on EE in East and Southern Africa are drawn to the end of the paper.