Tanzania was honoured as one of the recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize, announced by the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which recognises individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.
The award was conferred to six heroes of the environment from Tanzania, Cambodia, Slovakia, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the United States. The Goldman Prize recognizes fearless grassroots activists for significant achievements in protecting the environment and their communities.
The only winner from Africa, Edward Loure, is a Tanzanian, who has led a grassroots organization that pioneered an approach that gives land titles to indigenous communities–instead of individuals–in northern Tanzania, ensuring the environmental stewardship of more than 200,000 acres of land for future generations.
Edward Loure has worked steadfastly to secure land rights for the indigenous peoples of northern Tanzania in a way that protects traditional livelihoods and biodiversity. Loure has spent countless hours in the field working to apply an innovative legal mechanism that has secured a total of 84,476 hectares of land for wildlife and livestock grazing.
Loure, who is in his forties, is one of the founding members of Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT), one of the first Tanzanian conservation non-governmental organisations led and staffed by indigenous people. Loure is a member of the Maasai community, an indigenous group of pastoralists.
He grew up in the Simanjiro plains adjacent to Tarangire National Park. When the park was established in 1970, the Maasai residing within the park boundaries were forcefully evicted and lost access to valuable dry season water and pasture resources.
UCRT is a small, underfunded NGO, where staff spend months at a time in the field working with indigenous communities. Since 2007, Loure has led UCRT, driven by his passion for community rights and biodiversity conservation. As part of his leadership, Loure often partners with the Maasai Pastoral Women’s Council, an NGO that supports women’s rights within the Maasai community.
Under Loure’s leadership, UCRT was awarded the Equator Prize by the United Nations Development Program (2008). Loure speaks Maa, Kiswahili, and English. Northern Tanzania’s rangelands contain some of the world’s most diverse and abundant remaining terrestrial wildlife populations. The northern rangelands extend more than 2.8 million hectares from Lake Natron to Tarangire National Park and towards Kibaya in central Tanzania.
Loure and his team developed an innovative approach to applying the Tanzanian Village Land Act: a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO). Prior to Loure and UCRT’s work, CCROs had only been used to formalize an individual’s land holdings, and had never been applied communally. As a result of Loure’s work, the CCRO has become a vital tool for strengthening community land rights and protecting critical habitat. Rather than formalizing an individual’s land holdings in a village, the CCRO legalizes the land rights of an entire community under federal law. Source:
All Africa
