Serengeti General Management Plan

Serengeti National Park General Management Plan
Community outreach strategy
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Programme Purpose: The support and collaboration of the communities
surrounding SENAPA elicited in safeguarding the integrity of SENAPA’s
resource values
The SENAPA outreach strategy strives to align the long-term development of community outreach
in SENAPA with the programme purpose as defined above, and the organisational
goals of TANAPA. The aim of the strategy is to provide a general statement of principles and
policy to guide the Community Outreach Programme over the next 10 years.
Tanzanian National Parks was one of the first protected area management authorities in Africa
to actively embrace outreach activities for communities around national parks. Since the
late 1980’s, best practice in this field has rapidly evolved, following both successes and failures,
and this has fed into Tanzanian policy. The principle national policy-level instruments
that form the basis for the SENAPA outreach strategy are: the National Policies for National
Parks in Tanzania (1994), the Wildlife Policy of Tanzania (1998), and the TANAPA Strategic
Action Plan for Community Conservation Services (2000).
Of particular relevance to the outreach strategy is the mission statement of TANAPA’s Community
Conservation Services (CCS) Strategic Action Plan for 2001-2004, which states:
CCS is a field programme supported by a unit in TANAPA headquarters, which aims to
identify and implement opportunities for sharing parks’ benefits with adjacent communities.
CCS seeks to protect the integrity of National Parks by reducing conflicts between
wildlife and surrounding communities, by improving relations with those communities
and by helping to solve problems of mutual concern.
The importance of increasing the value of the national parks to local people is recognised in
the National Policies for National Parks in Tanzania. This policy states that TANAPA will extend
its activities “into surrounding communities with a focus on the local people and governments
up to the district level. This outreach programme will be accompanied by mechanisms
to ensure that the benefits of conservation are shared with local communities in appropriate
ways”. The policy encourages “compromise and flexibility” in order to meet the
needs of both the park and local people.
Over more than a decade, the SENAPA Outreach Department, which received a significant
boost from the EU/ FZS funded STEEP (Serengeti Tourism, Education and Extension Project),
has grown and strengthened and is now a firmly embedded and recognised aspect of
park management. Nevertheless the task of the Outreach Department is significant with a
population of some 2.3 million in the seven districts that abut the Park and nearly 300,000
living within 10 km of the park boundary. To work with these communities, the department
currently has only four professional staff with a small allocation (7.5%) of the park budget.
The SENAPA community outreach strategy has recognised the limitations of the resources
available and consequently concentrates on a few key aspects of the above national policies
in order to guide the implementation of this programme and the achievement of the programme
purpose, as described below: