Tanzania’s Indigenous defenders call for human rights in land conservation
“Growing up, my grandma used to tell me, “Whenever you touch the soil, you`re touching yourself.” Now I understand why she was saying that; it’s because she was giving me authority over it, to protect it. But today, the area where I sat with her is under conservation and I cannot even pass down to someone else what she told me,” said Nailejileji Asia Tipap.
Tipap is a Maasai environmental human rights defender from the Loliondo Division of Tanzania`s Ngorongoro District Loliondo, which borders the world-famous Serengeti National Park and forms a critical wildlife corridor. The region is shared culturally and ancestrally between Tanzania and Kenya by her subsection of the Maasai people, the Loita subsection.
She was raised in a nomadic pastoralist household and is one of a growing number of indigenous activists across East Africa who are challenging what they describe as a widening gap between the international conservation narrative and the lived reality on the ground.
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), established in 1959, holds three UNESCO designations: World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve, and Global Geopark. About 100,000 Maasai live there, coexisting with wildlife under a Multiple Land Use Model after being relocated from the Serengeti. Its UNESCO listings were granted without the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of Indigenous residents.
In 2022, authorities unilaterally converted 1,500 km² of designated Maasai village land into the Pololeti Game Reserve, triggering clashes in which security forces are said to have used live ammunition against community members, injuring some 30 people. The area is now at the centre of ongoing disputes over access, livestock confiscations, and the legality of the reserve`s creation.
In March 2026, two Presidential Commissions issued recommendations on land use in Ngorongoro and Loliondo, which were rejected by environmental human rights defenders, including the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA). They said the process was pre-determined and focused on implementing relocation rather than addressing residents’ concerns.
Conservation efforts may be endangering human rights
According to Tipap, the removal of the Maasai from their ancestral lands, that justified to the world as an environmental necessity, is in fact a pretext for mining, tourism investment and land acquisition by powerful outside interests.
“What we are seeing in conservation is the mushrooming of many hotels being built within Ngorongoro, some built along water sources, in areas that are used for our own ritual activity and others in areas that are no-goes for the Maasai or only used during the dry season,” she said.
Before colonization, the Maasai ranged freely across the Serengeti. Under an agreement with the British colonial administration, they were relocated to the Ngorongoro, Loliondo and Sale in the north. It was, she said, a contract, one that she believes the Tanzanian State has been slowly, systematically, breaking.
In recent years, Tipap added, the government began what it described as a voluntary relocation programme, resettling Maasai families from Ngorongoro to Msomera, Handeni District, a site in the distant coastal region of Tanga. The area has an entirely different climate, ecology and culture. The word "voluntary" requires some scrutiny according to Tipap.
“They suffocated all social services. People need passes to enter Ngorongoro now as if we were entering a different country. It’s my home place but I have to carry my registration card or my voter card whenever I go to work,” she said. “There was no outreach to the community to understand what they really wanted. Many activists received threats and intimidation.”
Tanzania`s civic space is classified as "repressed" by international monitors such as Freedom House and CIVICUS. Environmental and land rights defenders, particularly Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, women and youth, face mounting threats as large-scale economic investments and contested conservation models accelerate across the country.
Further, periods of political tightening have significantly constrained civil society, with violations often occurring with impunity due to weak accountability mechanisms, according to UN Human Rights’ Human Rights Advisor in Tanzania, Hilda Oyella.
Main environmental human rights issues in Tanzania
- Surveillance, harassment, and arbitrary arrest of defenders
- Forced displacement in Ngorongoro, Loliondo, and along the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) corridor
- Criminalization of those opposing extractive or conservation projects, labelled as "anti-development"
- Gendered and intersectional risks: women and Indigenous defenders face cultural marginalization and social stigma in addition to physical threats
- Absence of meaningful free, prior and informed consent in project implementation
While Tanzania`s Constitution, the Environmental Management Act, and international instruments (Rio Declaration, African Charter Art. 24, Paris Agreement, UNFCCC) provide a framework for rights-based environmental governance, a human rights-based approach remains absent in practice. Free prior and informed consent is treated as a procedural formality rather than a substantive right.
Building a coalition for environmental justice
After studying political science and public administration, Tipap joined a human rights organization amplifying Indigenous voices in Tanzania, working at the intersection of land rights, environmental justice, and gender advocacy. With three other Indigenous women activists, she co-founded Indigenous Women Development Affairs to preserve local ecological knowledge and strengthen environmental and land rights defenders.
“Last year, we were able to participate in the World Heritage Conference in Paris and showcase the issue of Ngorongoro in relation to the ecological knowledge of the community, who are really the conservators at the end of the day,” she said. “Why are we leaving these environmental land rights defenders behind and not giving them the space of being the custodian of this environment that we talk about?”
More recently, she has helped establish the Tanzania Environmental Governance Alliance (TEGA), a national coalition giving environmental land rights defenders a platform to share and learn.
UN Human Rights in Kenya
“The [Multi-Country] Office of the High Commissioner [for Human Rights] in Nairobi has really helped most of the environmental land rights defenders, especially by linking us to other environmental land rights defenders within the country and beyond. And we have been also working with many of them in Uganda, in Nairobi,” Tipap said.
“We are part of the movement now,”
—Nailejileji Asia Tipap, Indigenous environmental human rights defender
Since its establishment, the UN Human Rights Multi-Country Office for East Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya, has worked to strengthen the protection of environmental human rights defenders in Tanzania and Uganda.
In May 2025, the Office convened environmental defenders from across Tanzania for the first time, bringing them together in Dar es Salaam to discuss the risks they face and identify their support and coordination needs. At that stage, participants acknowledged being largely fragmented, not only geographically but also in terms of efforts and priorities.
To foster peer learning, the Office later supported the participation of several Tanzanian defenders in the annual meeting of the Kenyan environmental human rights defenders’ coalition, held in Mombasa in September 2025.
“This exposure visit proved transformative: witnessing how their Kenyan counterparts operate as a unified body demonstrated the tangible benefits of collective organizing for advocacy and protection, as opposed to working in silos or competing for resources,” said Roberta Serrentino, UN Human Rights Officer in Nairobi.
These cross-border relationships proved critical during the October 2025 general elections in Tanzania, when heightened risks forced some defenders to relocate. Drawing on the solidarity networks built in Mombasa, and fully supported by the Office, affected defenders were able to access practical assistance from the Kenyan environmental human rights defenders’ coalition.
Inspired by this experience, Tanzanian defenders established an independent coalition in October 2025: the Tanzania Environmental Governance Alliance (TEGA). While maintaining ties with the broader human rights defenders’ community, they created a dedicated platform to advance advocacy on land rights, extractive industries, and Indigenous peoples’ issues, which are often marginalized in wider protection frameworks.
The Office used remaining resources to support TEGA’s inaugural annual meeting in Moshi in January 2026, including procurement of materials for the new coalition. It has since supported TEGA’s strategic planning, engagement with UN human rights mechanisms, and initial resource mobilization. TEGA was officially registered in April 2026 and now has legal status.
For Tipap, the Office has provided practical support — connecting her coalition with regional networks, providing the platform and resources to organize their first annual meeting and offering a measure of protection. If statements pass through an international human rights body, she said, they are harder to suppress.
“We are losing our environment; we are losing our land. I need my daughters to be able to come and experience what I`ve experienced. I need them to see the beauty that we can still see today,” Tipap said.
“We are not against development but how are we prepared to protect the environment for future generations?”
Related:
UN Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples
Climate change and the environment
Civic space and human rights defenders
Photo on front page: Indigenous Maasai surveying their ancestral land. Source: Monica Dalmasso/AFP/hemis.fr. Photo on this page: Activists gathered outside the Tanzania High Commission in London to protest the planned eviction of 167,000 Maasai from Ngorongoro and Loliondo, 28 February 2022. Source: Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire.
