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Helping The Hadza Protect Their Homeland

The Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Northern Tanzania, face threats to their homeland from agricultural encroachment and pastoralists. Efforts by The Nature Conservancy and local partners have led to the Hadza securing legal land rights to 57,000 acres, allowing them to sustainably earn income and protect their traditional way of life. Their initiatives have garnered recognition, including the 2019 Equator Prize, highlighting the importance of preserving indigenous cultures while addressing climate change.

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Tseko Mosothoane
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9 views8 pages

Helping The Hadza Protect Their Homeland

The Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Northern Tanzania, face threats to their homeland from agricultural encroachment and pastoralists. Efforts by The Nature Conservancy and local partners have led to the Hadza securing legal land rights to 57,000 acres, allowing them to sustainably earn income and protect their traditional way of life. Their initiatives have garnered recognition, including the 2019 Equator Prize, highlighting the importance of preserving indigenous cultures while addressing climate change.

Uploaded by

Tseko Mosothoane
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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STORIES
STORIES IN
IN AFRICA
AFRICA

The Hadza

Helping Hunter-Gatherers Protect Their Homeland


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N
orthern Tanzania is home to the Hadzabe, one of the last remaining hunter-
gatherer tribes on Earth. Known for shunning material possessions and
social hierarchy, the Hadza roam as needed to find game, tubers and wild
berries.

Hunter-gatherer societies understand that their survival depends on natural resources.


The Hadza's deep reservoir of natural knowledge and light footprint on their land have
enabled them to persist in a challenging environment.
Hope for the Hadza DONATE

HOPE FOR THE HADZA Former TNC Africa Program Director David Banks talks about the Hadza, one of the last
remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, and how TNC is helping them protect their homelands.

Pressures on the Hadza Homeland


For years, the tribe had been watching their ancestral territory disappear. Whittled away
by encroaching pastoralists and agriculture, the boundaries of the wide-open spaces
they travel were shrinking, and the Hadza, like other indigenous communities, had no
formal claim to ownership.

By analyzing satellite imagery, The Nature Conservancy identified a chain reaction on


the ground. Agriculture encroaches mainly from the south, as the Sukuma people clear
woodland brush to grow beans and maize. The Datoga pastoralists, driven northward,
then graze livestock on semi-arid lands the Hadza rely on to find food.

Unless we act now to secure wildlife corridors and traditional land uses for pastoralists
and hunter-gatherers, the vibrant Hadza culture will likely be squeezed out of existence.
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HADZA WOMEN An elderly Hadza woman holding plants that the Hadza crush to make a glue for sticking feathers
to their arrows, Central Rift Valley, Tanzania © Nick Hall
HADZA HUNTERS The morning hunt begins with a survey of the area from a high vantage point. One of the hunters
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aims for a flying Egyptian goose. He barely misses from a great distance. © Kenneth K. Coe

Setting a Precedent: Land Rights Protected


Land rights in Tanzania are a complicated issue, but they are extremely important to the
future of Tanzania and its people. Communal lands are central to the Hadzabe and other
groups, and gaining legal rights to those lands as a community is the first step toward
keeping those lands undeveloped.

Our partner Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT), with support from the Dorobo
Fund and TNC, pioneered the Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO), a
form of individual, and more recently, group land tenure within a larger village holding.
This is an effective tool for strengthening community land rights and securing
communal lands.

In October 2011, the Hadza took the innovative step of asserting legal claim to their
homeland with a CCRO. They received official title — recognized by the government of
Tanzania — to 57,000 acres.

In 2012, we secured four more homeland designations and protected 90,000 additional
acres for the Datoga tribe. Their designations assert that more than 80 percent of their
lands will now be managed as grazing areas for livestock and wildlife.

Securing additional land for pastoral use helps both tribes, as the Datoga no longer need
to move onto Hadza land to graze cattle.

Now, the Northern Tanzania Rangelands Initiative, a coalition of 10 NGOs working to


create a thriving landscape where people and wildlife co-exist, has helped secure more
than 1.2 million acres of land for communities like the Hadza.
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ARCHERY PRACTICE The morning hunt begins with a survey of the area from a high vantage point. One of the
hunters aims for a flying Egyptian goose. He barely misses from a great distance. © Kenneth K. Coe
HUNTERS CLIMB BAOBAB TREE Hunters climb a baobab tree to extract honeycombs from a bee hive.DONATE
© Nick Hall

An Award-Winning Effort
With legal rights to the land, the Hadza then had the means to earn income from it in a
sustainable way. Working with Carbon Tanzania and other NTRI partners, the Hadza
established a mechanism that pays them for protecting their traditional forests.

They've since earned more than $300,000, which has gone toward paying school fees for
dozens of students, training rangers to monitor the community's land and its wildlife,
and improving health clinics. The money also pays to keep the forest protection program
running and expanding.

This nature-based solution to helping mitigate the effects of climate change is also
preserving a people's traditional way of life in a modern world. And for this reason, the
Hadza’s Yaeda Valley Project is a recipient of the 2019 Equator Prize, one of the United
Nation’s most prestigious awards for environmental protection and climate resilience.
REFLECTIONS AROUND THE FIRE At sundown, members of the Hadza tribe come together to build a fire and share
stories from the day. © Kenneth K. Coe DONATE

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