Study Site #8 – Simanjiro/Tarangire, Tanzania

Background

The Kisongo Maasai who live  in the Simanjiro area have  long pursued pastoralism on the  plains  north  and  east  of  the Tarangire National Park,  but  they  have  recently  adopted mechanized agriculture,  less  as  a  productive  form  of  land  use  than  as  a  strategy  to  secure  land  rights  to  a  region where the expansion of wildlife protection areas were seen to threaten their security of land holding. So paradoxically, due to the government’s legal recognition of rights to land under tillage but not to grazing lands, the community is driven to pursue a less productive livelihood that threatens wildlife access to the larger  wet-season  catchment  area  surrounding  the  National  Park  (protected  areas  are  invariably constructed around permanent water sources that serve as dry-season grazing). The challenge in this area is  to  conceive  of  a  legal  structure  (a Wildlife Management Area?)  that  will  protect  pastoral  use  rights  while  sustaining wildlife access to village lands, especially at a time that ideas are under consideration to create a wildlife corridor that will link Tarangire to Manyara Game Reserve and then to Ngorongoro and Serengeti to the to the northwest of Tarangire. The Tarangire-Simanjiro area has been the site of research by one of our collaborators, Prof. T. McCabe, and community development work by the Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT).

I-CAN activities

[coming soon]