Demographics and Economic Sustainability Consciousness for Sustainable Development in Higher Education Institutions: Study of Tanzania

Abstract

Sustainable Development (SD) in Africa is on-going including Tanzania. However, the UNDP report of 2023 highlights the need to speed up efforts so that Africa achieves the global goals by 2030. In view of this, it is critical to explore adaptation for SD in the context of Tanzania’s Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) including Open and Distance Learning (ODL) institutions. Hence, this paper’s purpose is to explore demographics and economic Sustainability Consciousness (SC) for SD . Specifically, this study examines age and economic SC awareness for SD in Tanzania. Quantitative method is deployed in this study and a sample size of 119 staff from selected universities in Tanzania provided the quantitative data that was subjected to descriptive statistics whereas qualitative data collected from 15 face to face interviews were analyzed using Nvivo. The findings revealed that most staff in relation to economic SC were between 30 to 40 years old (44.54%). In terms of economic SC awareness, the findings indicate that most of the staff strongly agree that elimination of poverty globally is necessary for SD (70.94%) and that SD requires companies to act responsibly towards their employees, customers and suppliers (61.54%). This paper implies that the economic practitioners including Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) experts should consider that the most of the middle-aged staff in HEIs have economic SC awareness in terms of the need to reduce poverty as well as companies to act with responsibilities not only to the employees but also customers and suppliers for SD.