Ireland, which is giving €170 million in overseas aid to Tanzania over the next three years, will continue to help the east African country "in whatever way it can", Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said yesterday.
Speaking in Dar es Salaam, Mr Ahern emphasised that Irish aid is not linked to trade deals, as happens frequently with donations from larger western countries.
"We have always taken the view that linking aid to trade is totally the wrong thing to do," said Mr Ahern, who later met Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete.
On the second of a three-day visit to Tanzania, Mr Ahern and Minister of State for Overseas Development Michael Kitt visited schools and hospitals funded by Irish Aid.
Ireland is now the largest international donor to Tanzania's health system, and €45 million will be spent over the next three years to pay for hospitals and clinics around the country.
Mr Kikwete yesterday offered "praise for and appreciation for" Ireland, and assured Mr Ahern that economic and political reforms will continue.
A corruption probe into the Central Bank of Tanzania, which has uncovered a fraud that led to the loss of $170 million, has no implications for the aid budget, he said.
The money lost did not belong to Tanzania or international donors, but had been accumulated from industry to pay foreign bills in the days of tighter foreign exchange controls, he said.
During a visit to the Irish-funded Mwananyamala Hospital, Mr Ahern was told that one woman dies every hour in childbirth in the east African country.
Forty babies a day are delivered by doctors in the Dar es Salaam hospital, some by their mothers on the floor of a ward that has just 10 maternity beds.
"How are they doing?" he asked one mother of her children as she turned shyly away.
Within 12 hours of birth, she and her child will have been discharged.
Dr Annath Rwebembera said the hospital was unable to keep mothers and their newborn babies for more than 12 hours after the birth.
Dr Rwebembera added that the hospital is one of the very few in the country to carry out Caesarean sections.
In the Kigilagila district of the city, Mr Ahern was shown a water purification programme partly funded by Ireland that has cut cholera cases in the city to almost nothing.
Locals are trained by a theatre display and song in better sanitation techniques and taught how to use water purification tablets made by an Irish company, Waterguard.
Later, Mr Ahern visited a leading clinic in the city that performs thousands of eye operations every year, and makes and fits over 2,000 artificial limbs.
The clinic, which is to receive €1.3 million from Ireland to build an extension, trains doctors from other parts of Tanzania and other parts of Africa, including Sudan.
Patients are strictly means-tested, and those with incomes pay fees to subsidise the care of others, while two-thirds of the clinic's budget comes from international donors.
During a discussion with leading Tanzanian newspaper and broadcast editors, Mr Ahern said that Ireland had concentrated its aid on a number of areas, particularly health.
However, he warned that no single solution existed to ensure that Tanzania's economy develops, pointing out that thousands of Irish missionaries had worked for decades to educate people.
Teaching had given people in Ireland from the 1950s onwards an education, which had "allowed them to trade their skills", Mr Ahern said.
