Shinyanga is one of Tanzania’s poorest regions, its low hills and plains characterized by long dry summers with only 700 mm of rainfall a year on average. As its woods were cleared from the 1920s onward, land and soil became over-used and degraded, causing a sharp decline in the natural goods on which the Sukuma people had depended for centuries.Women spent more time collecting formerly plentiful fuel wood; grasses to feed livestock became scarcer, as did traditionally harvested wild fruit and medicinal plants.
The region’s ecological problems were compounded by a booming human population and by the Sukuma’s extensive land-use needs. Nine in ten of Shinyanga’s households live by small-scale farming, with families dependent on cropland and livestock pasture for both subsistence farming and cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice (Monela et al. 2004:21-22). Since cattle are highly valued as a liquid asset, many households also kept livestock herds too large for their land to sustain, and burning of woodland to create pasture was common practice.
By the 1970s Shinyanga was under severe ecological strain, its people feeling the consequences in the form of falling incomes and lost livelihoods (Monela et al. 2004:12-13). Early attempts at reforestation launched by Tanzania’s government, the World Bank, and other agencies largely failed to stem the loss of indigenous woodland and its impact on communities. Top-down, bureaucratic management of projects meant that villagers had little involvement or stake in the success of these efforts. During the 1970s, the socialist government of President Julius Nyerere also adopted laws that increased communal ownership of rural land and encouraged people to live in discrete villages where services could be better provided—a process called “villagization.” Individual ngitili enclosures, which many villagers had carefully sustained for food, fodder, fuelwood, and medicines, were no longer encouraged. Indeed, many ngitili were destroyed during the period, as the villagization process undermined traditional institutions and practices (Monela et al. 2004:102).
In 1986, Tanzania’s government shifted tactics dramatically and launched the people-centered, community-based Shinyanga Soil Conservation Programme, known simply as HASHI (from the Swahili “Hifadhi Ardhi Shinyanga”). The impetus came from President Nyerere himself, who declared Shinyanga the “Desert of Tanzania” after touring the region. By 1987, HASHI was operational and by 1989 it had attracted additional, long-term support from the Norwegian Development Assistance Agency.
