Investing in land tenure and management to assure sustainable tourism revenues, natural resource utilisation a

General

The project secured collective land rights for surviving Hadzabe hunter–gatherer and Datoga pastoralist groups, and  improved  the governance of village lands in 11 neighbouring village areas in the Yaeda-Mangola area, east of Lake Eyasi, in Northern Tanzania, which forms an important wildlife and mobile human land use corridor. As the landscape is the foundation for rapidly growing cultural tourism, focused on the indigenous Hadzabe lifestyle, the project also developed a sustainable tourism management plan and code of conduct, founded on collective land rights security and effective land use planning, Today, Hadzabe and Datoga are dependent on landscape integrity to support their livelihoods, and Hadzabe on well managed tourism to generate essential cash income while maintaining their autonomy and dignity. The project has now established new revenue sharing arrangements between tourism operators, host communities, village councils, and district government. Intervention was urgently needed because pressure on land, natural resources and indigenous communities have been under increasing pressure from an influx of farmers from outside the area and from unregulated tourism operators. Through capacity building of village level land management institutions, participatory land use planning and securing community grazing and forest land, local communities, village councils and a wide range of local tourism operators all benefited from secured pastoral and hunter-gatherer livelihoods as a basis for more sustainable generation of tourism revenues. All public and private stakeholders and all different land-users (pastoralists, farmers, hunter-gatherer) were actively involved in every aspect of the land use planning and management process.   Grantee’s products and project documentation Cultural Tourism Poster The Lake Eyasi Landscape - Towards a Sustainable Tourism Management Plan