Rangeland Guardians: Women Entrepreneurs for Rangeland Restoration

Context

Covering 54% of earth's surface, with 88% lying outside protected areas, rangelands support diverse ecosystems, biodiversity and pastoralist communities. Rangelands are particularly vulnerable to climate change and anthropogenic pressure, which has led to an increase in rangeland degradation. Degradation reduces rangeland biodiversity and compounds rural poverty. 15% of remaining rangelands in Northern Tanzania are degraded. However, there is evidence that these rangelands have the potential to recover from degradation, therefore through sensitive land and grazing management, degraded landscapes can be restored.

This is a project to empower pastoralist women to drive sustainable rangeland management, reduce poverty and restore livestock grazing opportunities in the wildlife-rich Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem of northern Tanzania. The direct benefits to communities will ensure long-term sustainability of rangeland management strategies.

Key Aims and Objectives

There are 4 project themes:

1. Rangeland Guardians - Sustainable management restores grazing opportunities for livestock and wildlife. This can be driven by pastoralist women who are key agents of change. This project will empowering 60 women to become catalysts of sustainable rangeland management. 
2. Biodiversity - Wildlife corridor in the Tarangire - Manyara ecosystem supports iconic biodiveristy, yet populations of Beisa Oryx, Zebra and Giraffe have recently declined by >80%. Through regular biodiversity surveys, GPS tracking of livetock and restoraiton activites, this project will monitor biodiveisty changes and identify how the wider landscape is being used by pastoralists in relation to wider scale degradation patterns, to help inform rangeland management 
3. Community benefits - More than 800,000 pastoralists rely on the northern Tanzanian rangelands for their livelihoods, which are at risk from societal and environmental change. This project will provide trainging and edcation to the local communities including an Awareness campaign targeting >2,000 school students - advocating the importance of rangeland conservation and the opportunities deriving from rangeland restoration 
4. Governance - Rangeland degradation in northern Tanzania, driven by climate and societal change, threatens wildlife populations and food security for pastoralist communities. This project will improve rangeland management, restoring grazing opportunities for >10,000 adults and their families.