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| Edward Loure/courtesy of Goldman Environmental Prize |
From the Andes to sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous
groups are increasingly fighting for legal ownership of lands their ancestors
have occupied for thousands of years – and in the rangelands of Tanzania, one
activist believes he’s found a possible solution based on collective ownership.
Edward Loure, a Maasai leader and indigenous land rights activist from northern Tanzania, pioneered an innovative legal
mechanism to preserve large expanses of ancestral lands in the Great Rift
Valley, protecting both a traditional way of life and wildlife. It is the first time tribal work has been
linked to conservation in Tanzania - creating a model for other indigenous
groups elsewhere in Africa and around the world to follow.
Up
to two thirds of world's land held by indigenous people are under informal
systems not legally recognised by states, according to a recent report by Oxfam International. Communities
without formal title to lands where they may have lived for generations can be
displaced by large-scale resource extraction projects, sold off to the highest
bidder or seized by squatters clearing their land for illegal agriculture,
according to the report, backed by 300 organisations worldwide who are pushing
to expand land rights.
“Our land means everything to us. If we have no
grass pastures, we will not have our cows, and without our cows, we cannot
survive,” Loure told me, speaking via Skype from Dar es Salaam.
Loure, who is in his forties, grew up in the Simanjiro
plains in the vast northern rangelands of Tanzania. Here communities of
pastoralists and hunter-gatherers have lived off the land in harmony with
migrating wildlife for centuries. The
savannahs and grasslands of northern Tanzania are home to an abundance of
wildlife including gazelles, elephants, wildebeest, zebras, impalas and many other animals that keep the ecosystem in balance.
Traditional communities are a vital part of that ecosystem, Loure says. “We
depend on our lands and these lands have shaped our cultures and way of life.”
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| Edward Loure in his community/courtesy of Goldman Environmental Prize |
But
the pastoralists and hunter-gatherers’ traditional ways of life have been
threatened since the 1950s when the Tanzanian government started creating
National Parks. These efforts displaced thousands of indigenous people and
jeopardized wildlife by destroying migratory corridors. The situation has been exacerbated in recent years
by government sell-offs of ancestral lands to hunting and safari companies, and
by the encroachment of unauthorised “land grabbers” seeking to use traditional
grazing lands for large-scale farming.
Loure’s own community met a similar fate in 1970,
when it was forcibly displaced to create the Tarangire National Park. This
inspired Loure to join the Ujamaa Community Resource (UCRT), one of the first
community-led NGOs in Tanzania, which has championed sustainable development
and community land rights for the past 20 years.
Looking for better ways to secure land tenure,
Loure saw an opportunity in the strong communal culture among tribes. He worked
with UCRT to have a key legal mechanism called Certificates of Customary Rights
of Occupancy (CCROs) – the primary mechanism through which land is protected
under the Village Land Act – made available to groups, rather than only to individual
land-owners. And that opened the door to a string a land victories.
Over the years, at least 223,000 acres of
Tanzania’s northern rangelands have been safeguarded through CCROs. Once their
land rights are legally secured, communities can better access, manage and
benefit from their natural resources, Loure says.
These communal land rights concepts, innovated in Tanzania, have the
potential to have a global impact, says Matthew Brown, Africa Conservation
Director at The Nature Conservancy. “The
notion that we need to secure local people’s collective land rights and have it
officially signed off at the national level is replicable and is needed in
other countries.”
You can read more about Loure’s communal land
rights scheme and its impact in this story I wrote for Positive News.
