The World Conference on Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals provide pivotal guide to education sector policies in Africa and other developing regions. These policy guides promote basic education more than they do higher education. They argue that basic education provides higher rates of return on investment than higher education, and that it reduces poverty. Other scholars and policy analysts provide counter evidence against the claims for basic education. Despite the vigorous and spirited counter arguments and evidence of the weakness of the claims that anchor the support for basic education, there is no relenting in the prioritization of basic education.

While claims are made that education policy prioritization is based on rational decision making, prevailing policy school argues that policy making and prioritization is hardly a rational process. If policy making is hardly a rational process, how then are policies made? The question of how policy is made has eluded policy researchers and analysts for ages. This question is important in Africa where the marginalization of higher education is an age old question with a troubling history for Africans. It has a troubling history in that the Africans have had to fight colonial skepticism before the first universities could be established. Now it seems that they have to convince the World Bank and other international organizations of the need and support for higher education.

This study analyzes three policy documents, the Conference of African Ministers of Education (1982), the World Conference on Education for All (1990) and the Tanzania Education and Training policy (1995) to examine how different interest groups interpreted the same education sector condition. The study used an Education Sector Policy Analysis Framework to examine the establishment of policy agency, and how each agency interpreted education sector problems and solutions for Tanzania.

The findings demonstrate the complexity of understanding policy and policymaking. Policy and policymaking is better explained within an institutional context that examines how interest groups develop and construct social analysis rubrics which frame an angle for seeing and filtering a reconstructed reality of society. The social pattern arising out of the reconstructed reality allows interest groups to administer a stabilizing framework that isolates each group's version of the social problem facing society at a particular period.

The policy frame that gains legitimacy and prevails over the other alternatives is the one that makes greater claims to knowledge and expertise. Claims on knowledge and expertise are made through an institutional framework that employs professionals who study and promote a particular social analytical rubric that results in a particular frame of problems and solutions. The prevailing focus on basic education policy in Tanzania, and Africa in general, is largely promoted by international organizations that claim knowledge and expertise of international education and development.