Imagine living hours from any market, hospital, or social service. You live by fishing and farming—but suddenly there are fewer fish. You no longer know when to expect the rain. Crops that feed and finance your family aren’t growing. The environment is changing.
What can you do to make sure your family is resilient to these unexpected changes?
Pathfinder International and The Nature Conservancy–through the Tuungane project—are helping 44 remote, vulnerable communities that live along the Eastern basin of Tanzania’s Lake Tanganyika to manage these environmental changes. These communities have always relied upon the lake for their survival: in fact, 40% of their protein source comes from fish in the lake.
A rapidly increasing population, however, means many more fishermen and fewer fish. Agricultural productivity in the region is expected to decrease by 10-20% due to water scarcity from dwindling rainfall. In an area without government-supported irrigation systems, the environmental context is particularly precarious.
Tuungane is an integrated population, health and environment (PHE) project that improves people’s health and increases their ability to sustainably manage natural resources for their livelihoods and for conservation. Doing so increases the capacity of these populations to withstand changes in their social, economic and biological systems—changes now exacerbated by climate change.
Tuungane works with the government to improve access to quality health care, including sexual and reproductive health care. It builds community capacity to be able to find opportunities in wider economic systems, and it trains farmers on a range of climate and conservation agricultural techniques.
As well documented by the UN, women’s economic empowerment is key as it boosts productivity and increases economic diversification and income equality, in addition to many other positive development outcomes.
One innovation used by Tuungane to empower women economically and support community resiliency is women’s savings and loan groups. Women in these groups can secure low-interest loans to start environmentally conscious businesses and at the same time, join discussions about reproductive health and natural resource management. Women now have extra cash that they invest in their families, including the education of their children.
Asia Juma is a member and treasurer of “Ukakamavu” savings and loan group, which formed in 2016. Asia started a small business buying and selling grains. She used her extra cash to upgrade her family’s thatched roof to tin. She also purchased health insurance for the family through the Community Health Fund (CHF) program.
“Health is everything. I cannot get engaged in any productive work if any of my family members is sick and we have no money to pay the bills. With CHF, at least I’m sure we will get treatment whether we have savings or not.” She is now working on improving household sanitation, noting that “it is much easier to avoid outbreak of diseases like cholera if you have an improved latrine.”
Asia meets regularly with the 19 other members of her group to support their businesses and to garner support for hers, creating an increasingly resilient community of women in her village. Despite improvements in the lives of people like Asia Juma, making the communities around Lake Tanganyika truly resilient to environmental shocks is still a challenge in such a remote and vulnerable region.
Women’s education usually ends with primary school, after which they marry or become pregnant. To really grow their small businesses, they need to access additional capital, transportation infrastructure, and training for financial management, negotiation, and marketing. Until a few years ago, there was no cellphone access in the area, and transportation to towns and cities is still very limited. During the rainy season, people must take a boat to transport perishable goods to market, which is unsafe, expensive, and unreliable.
Tuungane has increased the resilience of women in these communities by increasing their access to health care, improving their ability to plan their families through access to contraception, and increasing their ability to sustainably manage their resources through capacity building and inclusion into decision making bodies in the community.
To address these myriad challenges and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, we need to create safety nets for resilience in communities impacted by climate change and natural resource depletion, and we need partners to do that. It is only with a range of different capacities that we can work through an integrated approach to address the complex challenges that these communities face. Our work through Tuungane reminds us of this complexity of integration and the inspiring resilience that can result from it.