Background

Tanzania’s outstanding and world-renowned natural resources and wild places are coming under increasing pressures as a result of growing human populations, increasing development expectations, and rapid land use change. In response to these challenges, the Tanzanian Government has identified the need for policy and legislation reform and capacity-building initiatives at both central and decentralized levels, in order to strengthen environmental management and enable local communities to take greater responsibility for the sustainable management of natural resources - including wildlife. The Tanzania Environment and Natural Resources Management Programme, a 16-year, multi-sectoral initiative, was designed to address these needs and in particular to promote and support environmental and wildlife management policy development and capacity building. The programme was implemented by a group of leading environmental and conservation NGOs in Tanzania, including the World Wide Fund for Nature, African Wildlife Foundation, Jane Goodall Institute, and Africare, with financing provided by the USAID Tanzanian Country Programme.

Our contribution

CDC was enlisted to undertake a comprehensive final evaluation of programme achievements, impacts and lessons learnt, involving field visits to several project sites and extensive stakeholder consultations. Our work identified that, while good progress had been made with implementing the national environmental policy, the same was not true in the wildlife sector, where finalisation of the wildlife legislation had stalled, with major impacts for the rolling out of wildlife management activities on the ground. For example, while progress had been made in developing guidelines for the establishment of community-managed Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs), these guidelines were user unfriendly and not conducive for promoting community empowerment and equitable sharing of economic benefits from wildlife. Based on our evaluation findings, we developed a variety of recommendations designed to overcome the main challenges, including significant revisions to the WMA regulations, strengthened participation of communities in the implementation process, and enhanced capacity building of the responsible government agencies.

Customers