Strengthening Voices: How Pastoral Communities and Local Government are Shaping Strategies for Adaptive Environmental Management and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania’s Drylands

The Strengthening Voices project is a training course that explains the economic and ecological process at the heart of pastoral systems. Tanzania’s national policies for planning and sustainable development recognise the central importance of local participation. In the National Strategy for Growth and the Reduction of Poverty, Tanzania now also recognises pastoralism as a "sustainable livelihood." Known as the Mkukuta, the strategy advocates for the first time for a more "efficient utilization of the rangeland" and for the "empowering of pastoralists to improve livestock productivity."

The project has focused on establishing partnerships at three levels to contribute to wider capacity building and respond to government policy. According to the doucment:

1. The community level: to develop the dry lands properly local people must be totally involved, and, to do so, their capacity needs to be built.
2. The local government level: this is where participation and locally-based development becomes a reality. To be effective, local government institutions need to understand and value what local people are actually doing.
3. The national policy level: the overall framework that will allow local and community development to happen.

The Strengthening Voices initiative has helped to bridge the gap between local government and local people. District strategic plans now seek to reconcile government-led sectoral planning with community-led holistic planning. Government officials are now more open to valuing local livelihoods and working with traditional institutions, and community elders are more open to engaging with government. The project has helped to build a pool of well-informed practitioners and policymakers on the dynamics of dryland environments and livelihoods, a human resource for addressing the challenges of climate change. A collaboration between institutes in Europe and East Africa has led to the design and development of a new academic programme on drylands policy.