Tanzania

Mental healthcare counsellors/psychologists are very poorly recorded in the research scope. Alternatively mental disorders are often treated by primary healthcare providers, such as community health workers, general nurses, and community health officers, who have received very limited training in the delivery of mental healthcare (Ngoma, Prince, & Mann, 2003). At this time there exists no community based healthcare providers in Tanzania who have been trained in the clinical capacities needed to identify, diagnose, and treat Depression in young people (Kutcher et al., 2017).

In Tanzania, guidance and counselling began in the year of 1984 ( Omari, 2008 ). It was soon after the introduction of boarding schools that led to moral deterioration and existence of HIV/AIDS pandemic which made people to lose hope and life. Twenty years ago the ministry of health decided to introduce guidance and counselling at the University of Dar es salaam as the way to overcome the problem. Guidance and counselling is now spread on educational institution, what we can call expert guidance and counselling in Tanzania schools began in the year 1984 following the National October 1984 Arusha Conference where advice and counselling services were endorsed by the government as an integral part of the country’s instruction ideas (Omari, 2008).

The subject of guidance and counselling is very popular and favoured by the Tanzanian school system which mainly focused in educating children at the school level by providing the necessity of counselling to educate them. There are various journal articles that focus on school guidance and counselling. It also points out how the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) took initiatives to train school counsellors for the purpose of establishing counselling services in schools (Mabula & Edna, 2017). This means that counsellors need to have intensive training so as to deal with the personal world of students and help them understand themselves in relation with their internal world. It is further emphasized that guidance and counselling is based on the recognition of the dignity and worth of the individual client and right to choose what is good for him/her. Hence it is the responsibility of the school counsellors to establish an environment where their students can attend for counselling voluntarily and seek help willingly (Mutie & Ndambuki, 1999).