Mama Misitu Campaign
Mama Misitu Campaign is a five years a communications campaign aiming to improve the governance of Tanzania’s forests and improve the legality of forest harvesting, so that the people of Tanzania can increasingly benefit from sustainably managed forests.
Mama Misitu
The Campaign is called Mama Misitu (‘Mother Forests’), summoning visions of a mother taking care of her house and the environment. Mama Misitu Campaign promotes women participation in bringing changes towards improving forest governance.
Where we came from?
In 2008 the Tanzania Forest Working Group (TFWG) launched the pilot phase of the campaign in response to TRAFFIC’s 2007 report on illegal timber trade, ‘Forestry, Governance and National Development: ‘lessons learnt from a logging boom in Southern Tanzania’. This report brought several key issues to light, including revenue shortfalls, large scale corruption, and unsustainable rates of harvesting and loss of biodiversity.
The report recommended community participation in forest management through outreach and advocacy to reduce illegal logging. It is for these reasons that the project takes the form of a campaign and not a conventional project. The pilot phase ran for two years and lessons from the pilot phase made the Tanzania Forestry Working Group develop this five year implementation phase (2011-2016).