Tanzania is today one of the greatest aid recipients in the world, but still - after over 45 years of huge amounts of aid - one of the poorest and least developed countries. How can that be? Civil society is said to benefit the democratization process, but has not succeed in Tanzania. Has the extensive aid had any impact? Our purpose is to investigate this set of problems. We are using theories concerning civil society and aid in general, and the theoretical framework developed by Hadenius and Uggla ?Making Civil Society Work, Promoting Democratic Development: What Can States and Donors Do??, in particular. We attempt to apply these theories on the case of Tanzania, to be able to analyze the effects of foreign aid on civil society. We are then going to, based on the results, scrutinize the new development strategies carried out by the Tanzanian government in cooperation with the aid donors, to see if they can influence civil society in a positive way. Our findings let us conclude that the above mentioned strategies might reduce aid dependency if the state implements them well, but the chance that the strategies will provide autonomous organizations is limited
