Suchergebnisse

Smallholder farmers in rural areas need access to institutional support for their effective responses to climate change and related challenges. Rural Local Institutions (RLIs) are very close to farmers and thus have the potential to deliver institutional support and enhance smallholder farmers' adaptability to climate change and variability. This article responds to two important questions; one, what institutional support that smallholder farmers perceive as relevant in addressing their adaptation challenges? and, how farmers access to that institutional support? To answer these questions, I conducted a study framed within mixed methods design targeting smallholder farmers in 5 villages of Rufiji district in Southern Tanzania. Data collection protocol started with qualitative approaches; Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) and FGDs, to explore the nexus between local understanding of climate change adaptation and institutional roles in adaptation. This informed and was complemented by quantitative survey of 416 farming households obtained through stratified random sampling. Quantitative data analysis was done with the assistance of the Statistical Package for Social Sciencies (SPSS v.16) software. Qualitative analysis followed content analysis framework using Nvivo 12 software. The study found that smallholder farmers perceive a mismatch between their perceived adaptation needs and available institutional support. Farmers identified access to markets, access to climate information; access to agricultural inputs, skills and technologies, land tenure security and access to credits as critical institutional factors necessary for their effective adaptation to climate change and variability challenges. Also that their access to the available institutions for adaptation support is poor due social, environmental, political and economic barriers.The paper argues that RLIs require capacity building to enable them comprehend, design, prioritize, and coordinate farmers' adaptation actions in relation to other development actions.

Community-Based Health Insurance schemes are meant to expand the coverage of healthcare provision to, especially, the majority poor in the rural areas of the Developing World. Despite high sensitization and mobilization campaigns, enrolment, re-enrolment and utilization of such schemes have been unexpectedly low. This is also the case with the Redesigned Community Health Fund (rCHF) in Tanzania. We took a qualitative approach to explore the reasons for the drop-outs of the rCHF in Mpwapwa District in central Tanzania. We reviewed various rCHF-related documents and used Key Informant Interviews and Focused Group Discussions to collect data from randomly selected drop-out cases. The findings suggest the availability of drugs, premium costs, quality of healthcare facilities as key reasons influencing households to enrol, re-enrol or drop-out of the rCHF. In this paper we argue that rCHF should integrate more participatory approaches to understand local concerns and re-design the scheme to address the challenges.
Keywords: Drop-outs; Community Based Health Insurance; rCHF
Community-Based Health Insurance schemes are meant to expand the coverage of healthcare provision to, especially, the majority poor in the rural areas of the Developing World. Despite high sensitization and mobilization campaigns, enrolment, re-enrolment and utilization of such schemes have been unexpectedly low. This is also the case with the Redesigned Community Health Fund (rCHF) in Tanzania. We took a qualitative approach to explore the reasons for the drop-outs of the rCHF in Mpwapwa District in central Tanzania. We reviewed various rCHF-related documents and used Key Informant Interviews and Focused Group Discussions to collect data from randomly selected drop-out cases. The findings suggest the availability of drugs, premium costs, quality of healthcare facilities as key reasons influencing households to enrol, re-enrol or drop-out of the rCHF. In this paper we argue that rCHF should integrate more participatory approaches to understand local concerns and re-design the scheme to address the challenges.

AbstractThe changing shape of sustainability governance has been a key academic and policy concern in the past two decades, as part of a wider debate on the interactions between public and private authority in governing the economy, society, and the environment. In this article, we contribute to these debates by examining how these interactions operate locally and across jurisdictions in three conservation and development initiatives in Tanzania and what impact they have on the functional quality of sustainability governance. We find that clear division of responsibilities, coupled with material incentives for communities and equal and transparent distribution of benefits, are key positive contributors to functional quality. These factors underpin the complementary interactions (collaborative at the local level; institutional layering across jurisdictions) that are needed to successfully negotiate and implement the compromises needed to balance conservation and development goals. We also find that competitive dynamics are harmful to functional quality, especially those taking the form of local institutional duplication and of dominance by central government across jurisdictions. These tend to appear especially when sustainability initiatives involve multiple stakeholders with wide discrepancies in resources, interests, and power, which leads to compromises determined in a top‐down manner.

Tanzania's President sent a plane to Madagascar in May 2020 to bring a shipment of Covid-Organics, a purported cure and prevention for COVID-19. The herbal remedy was described as a gift to help African countries in need. Drawing on preliminary data in English and Kiswahili from unstructured participant observation, social and legacy media available online and shared through contact channels, and ongoing conversations, we explore the Tanzanian policy response to COVID-19. What can the exemplary case of Covid Organics in Tanzania help us to understand about South-South humanitarian assistance (SSHA) in times of crisis? We suggest that Covid-Organics has enabled the government to project a link to latent debates about Pan-Africanism and Julius Nyerere's legacy and Madagascar's SSHA has provided an opportunity for a public reflection on Africa's place in the world. For some, the remedy's 'Africanness' is its comparative advantage, even promising a continental renaissance. For others, the lack of scientific evidence or approval by global health authorities like WHO is delegitimizing. These findings suggest that receivers of SSHA make sense of it in both a broad, post-colonial discursive context and in a specific context of local contestation. If the promise of this particular form of aid is its ability to transcend deep divisions between North and South, the case of Covid-Organics suggests that SSHA draws on deep ideologies of pan-Africanism; is increasingly important in crises that are global; and like other forms of humanitarianism, reflects elite politics and priorities rather than prioritizing the distribution of humanitarian goods and decreasing inequality.

New and more complex partnerships are emerging to address the sustainability of natural resource use in developing countries. These partnerships variously link donors, governments, community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business, certification agencies and other intermediaries. High expectations and many resources have been invested in these initiatives. Yet, we still do not know whether more sophisticated organizational structures, more stakeholders involved, and more advanced participatory processes have delivered better sustainability outcomes, and if so, in what sectors and under what circumstances. To fill this knowledge gap and build capacity in this area, the NEPSUS research and capacity building project assembles a multidisciplinary team to analyze sustainability partnerships in three key natural resource sectors in Tanzania: forestry, wildlife and coastal resources. In each of these sectors, we assess whether co-management with local communities and private and civil society actors, and putatively more participatory processes in the governance of renewable resources, result in more equitable and sustainable livelihoods and environmental outcomes. We compare 'more complex' partnerships to relatively 'simpler', more traditional top-down and centralized management systems, and to instances where sustainability partnerships are not in place. This working paper tackles the main conceptual, methodological and research design issues arising in this effort.