TANZANIA AND WELL BEING OF ITS PEOPLE.

Tanzania is an endowed country from the spice groves and palm fringed beaches of Zanzibar to the snow caped of Kilimanjaro and the amazing creater of Ngorongoro, Tanzania has not only the diversity of climatic and geographical zones but has also the cultural variation across the country. Tanzania is also a coastal state gifted with fisheries resources with the present annual fish catch is around 350,000 metric tons.
Tanzania has also about 33.5 million hectares of forests and woodlands where 13 million hectares of this total forest have been gazetted as forest reserves. The forest offers habitat for wildlife, beekeeping and provide unique natural ecosystems with various genetic resources. Tanzania has a rich diversity spectrum of fauna and flora including wide variety of endemic spp and sub-spp.
The wildlife of Tanzania is a unique natural heritage and resource that is of great importance both nationally and globally. Tanzania has 19% of its surface area gazzeted as Protected Areas (National Parks, Game reserves and Game Controlled Areas).
Tanzania’s wealth in terms of minerals according to geological survey conducted in 2009 by the ministry of energy and minerals revealed that there are million of tons of mineral deposits. The five key minerals and their amounts in Gold 2,222 tones, Nickel 209 million tones, Diamonds Carat 50.9 million, Copper 13.65 million tones and Iron ore 103 million tones.

MAJOR PROBLEMS FACING TANZANIA.

Tanzania remains one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and face various environmental crisis which results mainly in massive poverty. Thus around less than 30% of people in rural areas have access to safe water and malnutrition have doubled for the last 25 years despite of all the resources found in the country.
This is mainly accounted by little revenue left to the government by multinational companies as only 3% of revenue from mining is for the government while from fisheries is 1.6% - 3.1%. Forest and Wildlife sector contribution to Gross Domestic Product is between 2.3%- 10% of the countries registered export.

Also Poor policy formulation and implementation has also contributed to problems in Tanzania, also abuse of power because some of the government officials are granted with much power on resources. In Wildlife Act of 1998 the Director of Wildlife is given power and authority of allocating hunting quarters to companies something which is not right for proper management of those resources.

However Poor formulated contracts such as the sh200bn deepen fish contract it doesn’t specify how many tones of fish would be harvested according to provisions in the contract. From such kind of situation the Tanzania government is not sure of how much tones of tuna are going to be harvested and how much profit is accrued from it. Thus may be even the 200bn is only a small percent of what Tanzania is required to gain.


SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.

Proper policies to ensure such resources are conserved managed and developed on sustainable basis in order to archive the intended national social economic objectives.

The private sector, the community, non governmental organizations and other non state actors have a useful role to play in development, management and sustainable utilization of natural resources. They have diverse experience and expertise and capacity in sector therefore their support is required to archive the sector objectives.

Well framed and focused contracts must be formulated before engaging in any kind of investments in order to avoid the country to be on the loss when comes the profit and revenue accrued from utilization of our natural resources.