PUBLICATIONS
August, 2024
Precarious Care across Migrant Generations in Tanzania
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article is concerned with how undocumented refugees and migrants use invisibility strategies to navigate a hostile host environment in Western Tanzania. This article explores how the shifts in Tanzania’s refugee policy have affected different generations of refugees differently, and how older cohorts assist newer cohorts. This article argues that the challenges of migration are productive of ‘affective circuits’ and of generating new forms of kinship. It argues that it can be productive to bring together the different understandings of generations, as it was found that generations as cohorts can transform into generations as kin in situations of rupture and adversity.
Turner, S. & Ruzibiza, Y (2024). Precarious Care across Migrant Generations in Tanzania. Genealogy. 8: 110.
July, 2024
Swiping to End Hunger: The Problematic Politics of Humanitarian Donation Apps
Møller Ølgaard, D. & Richey, L. A. (2024) Swiping to end hunger: the problematic politics of humanitarian donation apps. International Affairs. 100: 4, 1451–1470
The emergence of humanitarian donation apps promises to revolutionize aid by making it easier for people to give to humanitarian causes with just a few swipes on the smartphone in the palm of their hands. Yet, little is known about the implications of this for the politics and ethics of contemporary aid. This article explores the politics of humanitarian donation apps through an in-depth study of the World Food Programme's donation app ShareTheMeal. By analysing data from a detailed app walkthrough and documentation in a user journal of the experiences of a sample of app users, the article shows how ShareTheMeal is designed to afford specific forms of everyday humanitarianism, and how users adopt, appropriate or resist these affordances. Doing so we find that, while ShareTheMeal affords a convenient and gratifying donation experience, it also reinvigorates racial and paternalistic divisions between donors as benevolent saviours and recipients as voiceless victims, and integrates users into an extractivist data economy. Hence, rather than revolutionizing aid, ShareTheMeal instead sediments unequal relationships of agency and dependency in and through everyday acts of helping. Yet, because of apps' openness to user resistance and change, another politics of humanitarianism is nevertheless possible.
June, 2024
The Impact of Religious Influence on Humanitarianism: Evidence from Local Communities Affected by Floods in Kilosa, Tanzania
Kitula, L. S. & Mhando, N. E. (2024) The Impact of Religious Influence on Humanitarianism: Evidence from Local Communities Affected by Floods in Kilosa, Tanzania. Tanzania Journal of Population Studies and Development. 31: 1, 1-20
This article aims to elucidate the impact of religion on humanitarian practices within local communities affected by floods and the resulting contributions to community survival. Empirical data derived from interviews and focus group discussions conducted with community members in Mowero and Mbigiri wards, Kilosa District, in Morogoro Region, forms the basis of the study findings. Both Muslims and Christians perceive assisting the needy as a divine directive and command, with Holy Scriptures such as the Bible and Quran affirming that those helping their fellow humans will receive divine rewards. The act of helping the needy is identified as a means of validating one's faith, expiating sin, demonstrating respect for others, engaging in worship, and fulfilling a duty to God. The study reveals that individuals in flood-affected local communities actively engage in humanitarianism by helping victims. These acts encompass providing basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, facilitating education services by covering school fees and acquiring uniforms for students, and offering health-related services. Such humanitarian practices significantly contribute to community survival by ensuring the availability of essential resources for victims, promoting good health and well-being, and facilitating access to social services, particularly education for children. This article not only highlights how religiously influenced humanitarianism is pivotal for community survival but also underscores the essential role played by individual local community members as crucial contributors to government and development partners' endeavours in safeguarding people's well-being during and after natural disasters like floods.
June, 2024
The Legal and Institutional Challenges Facing Community-Based Disaster Management in Tanzania
Mlingwa, E. (2024) The Legal and Institutional Challenges Facing Community-Based Disaster Management in Tanzania. Tanzania Journal of Population Studies and Development. 31: 1, 83-103
This article examines the legal and institutional challenges facing community-based disaster management in Tanzania. This study employed qualitative methods to analyse the legislative and institutional framework governing disaster management in Tanzania. Data was gathered through interviews and focused group discussions with stakeholders engaged in disaster management in Tanzania. The study results indicate that government actors acknowledge the significance of community-based disaster management. However, the integration of local communities in the disaster management process is impeded by various legal and institutional challenges. There exists a notable discrepancy between the policy and legislation governing disaster management. Additionally, the allocation of funds for disaster management is limited, and the avenues for public participation are ineffective. The requirement for sufficient integration of local communities is necessary to foster community-based disaster management. The study suggests a range of legal and institutional changes to improve the integration of communities in the disaster management process. These proposed reforms include legal empowerment of local communities, acknowledging the value of indigenous knowledge, strengthening disaster management committees by offering financial assistance and promoting greater involvement of the civil society.
5th June, 2023
The messy practice of decolonising a concept: Everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania (2023)
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Sulley, C. R. & Richey, L. A. (2023) The messy practice of decolonising a concept: Everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania. Review of International Studies. 49: 3, 390–403
This article explores the messy practice of decolonising a concept through collaborative work between scholars researching together the meaning of everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania. Humanitarianism is typically understood as the state-centric, formal, Northern-driven helping of distant others in crisis. Using the concept of everyday humanitarianism, our article challenges these assumptions in three ways. First, it explores the everyday humanitarian actions of ordinary citizens in times of crisis. Second, it explores these responses in a Southern context. Third, it focuses explicitly on the givers and not only the receivers of humanitarian help. Our work grounds decolonisation in the actual practices of research aimed at theory building as an iterative back-and-forth exchange with particular attention to power, rather than as a transplant of Northern theory on the South, or its opposite. Our first argument is that the objective of collaborative research to capture the local politics of giving and then use these practices to interrogate the theoretical concept of everyday humanitarianism can be decolonising. Second, we argue that the practices of the academic labour that produces knowledge or inductive theory can also be decolonising. Understanding both the challenges and the possibilities of decolonising ‘humanitarianism’ will provide an opportunity to document and thus legitimate the complexity that is inherent in decolonising a discipline.
June, 2023
An Examination of the Humanitarianism-Disaster Management Nexus in Tanzania’s Policy and Legal Framework (2022)
Majamba, H. I. (2023) Humanitarianism-Disaster Management Nexus in Tanzania's Policy and Legal Framework. HURIA Journal of the Open University of Tanzania, Vol. 29 Issue 1, 2022. ISSN 0856 6739.
The use of law, the main tool for implementing policy, to regulate and coordinate disaster management, preparedness and response systems features in many jurisdictions. Also, international guidance on the use of effective laws and policies, which emphasize taking on board critical stakeholders, including humanitarian responders is available. Consequently, the government of Tanzania has promulgated a new disaster
management law as part of a wider reform of the legal framework to regulate disaster management and response systems which seek to involve stakeholders at all stages. This article analyses the extent to which the restructured legal framework and supporting policy address humanitarian responders who provide informal assistance, often before formal government intervention. The article traces the history of disaster management policies and laws in the country in the context of the humanitarianism – disaster management nexus. It focuses on the aftermath
of the earthquake that ravaged Kagera Region in Bukoba district in the northern west part of the country in September 2016. This analysis is supported with field data from Bukoba district. The findings reveal that the legal framework for regulating disaster management and response system does not reflect international and regional clarion calls for engaging informal humanitarian responders. Recommendations on how this gap can be addressed are provided, laying emphasis on incorporating the clarion calls in order to improve the country’s legal and policy framework for disaster response and management systems.
October 5, 2022
Social Categorization and Local Humanitarian Help: The Limitations of Legal Categories for Refugees (2022)
In her new publication for Utafiti Journal of African Perspectives, our senior reseacher Opportuna Kweka examines the tensions between social and legal categorization of refugees, and how this affects their ability to receive humanitarian help. The legal categorization of refugees in Tanzania has resulted in the requirement that they maintain residence in camps, and in the restriction of their movements. Refugees residing in designated camps are supposed to receive full support through humanitarian aid. However, the protracted nature of refugees’ stay in Western Tanzania has resulted in a decline of monetary and practical support, as well as donor fatigue over time. A review of the literature about humanitarian aid reveals a widely shared misconception that most humanitarian support for refugees in Tanzania generates from the global North. This false assumption is challenged by showing how refugees and their host communities take part in everyday humanitarian practices. Refugees are compelled to socially re-categorize themselves in order to access the local assistance provided by their host communities.
Kweka, O. L. (2022). Social Categorization and Local Humanitarian Help: The Limitations of Legal Categories for Refugees, Utafiti, 17(2), 197-216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/26836408-15020065
April 10, 2022
Spaces of Interaction Between Protracted Refugees in Nyarugusu Camp and the Surrounding Hosting Communities (2022)
Msoka, R. & Kweka, O. (2022) Spaces of Interaction Between Protracted Refugees in Nyarugusu Camp and the Surrounding Hosting Communities, Journal of the Geographical Association of Tanzania, 41(2): 59-78.
In their new publication Spaces of Interaction Between Protracted Refugees in Nyarugusu Camp and the Surrounding Hosting Communities at the Journal of the Geographical Association of Tanzania, our PhD student Rosemary Msoka and South Team Leader Opportuna Kweka outline the spaces of interaction that are formed between refugees in the Nyarugusu camp and the surrounding host communities in western parts of Tanzania, studying their everyday interactions and exchange. The fieldwork was conducted between March and December 2020, where a total of 45 semi-structured interviews and 12 FGDs were carried out, with observations being done in the refugee camp, host community villages and different markets where refugees and the host communities interact. Drawing from literature on space, and how spaces are constructed and function over time, particularly on how humanitarian spaces are constructed, the paper argues that encamped refugees’ interaction with host communities has led to the expansion of humanitarian space of support. The expansion of space by the mobility of refugees out of the camp to the host communities’ areas symbolizes power and control of space by refugees, hence proving that the power of space construction does not only end with those in planning authorities and decision-makers, but to different users of space. Despite challenging the formal support to refugees in camps, which is mainly North to South support, and which is increasingly being minimised due to protracted situations, the paper shows that this support is useful to encamped refugees as it helps them interact with host communities by giving refugees something to bargain with.
October 29, 2021
Invisible Resilience: Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Earthquake Disaster Management in Kagera Region, Tanzania (2021)
![UTAF_016_02_05-Hambati[1] (1)_page-0001.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ef70c7_10d28b1e04f14377a81e38fec8a8f6ba~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_114,y_90,w_762,h_1019/fill/w_367,h_491,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/UTAF_016_02_05-Hambati%5B1%5D%20(1)_page-0001.jpg)
Hambati, H. (2021) Invisible Resilience: Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Earthquake Disaster Management in Kagera Region, Tanzania. Utafiti, 16(2):247-270.
https://brill.com/view/journals/utaf/16/2/article-p247_5.xml
In this paper by EHTZ Senior Researcher Dr. Herbert Hambati illuminates the gaps that exist between how indigenous knowledge systems and local people respond to earthquakes and how government, donors and other formal disaster responders think about managing these crises.
Through the integration of a diversity of fieldwork data the paper shows how the formal mechanisms of global assistance constitute disaster management failure by design. Through a study of earthquake affected wards in the Kagera region, he argues that it is rather the local experts who sustain human lives in the weeks and months before external aid comes to the rescue. Gaps in management are a result of gaps in recognition; these identified ‘invisible stakeholders of disaster management’ or ‘everyday humanitarians’ are crucial in local level disaster response, yet their contributions to their own survival remain invisible to central government and the global arena. Traditional means of forecasting environmental catastrophes and of providing essential assistance in the aftermath of natural disasters are reflections of cultural values, socio-economic sophistication, and scientific expertise within communities whose resilience needs to be recognized, assisted, and promoted. Indeed, it is poverty – not lack of expertise - that acts as the root cause of destruction and damage after earthquakes in the Kagera region of Tanzania, and hence remains the main problem to be solved.
Following his conclusions, Hambati encourages that the educational curricula of the future, involving a new generation of academicians, should integrate this crucial indigenous knowledge into the nation’s mainstream disaster management framework.
February 10, 2021
South-South humanitarianism: The case of Covid-organics in Tanzania (2021)
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Richey, L. A., Gissel, L. E., Kweka, O. L., Bærendtsen, P., Kragelund, P., Hambati, H. Q., & Mwamfupe, A. (2021).
South-South humanitarianism : The case of Covid-organics in Tanzania. World Development, 141, 105375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105375
The paper is open access and can be downloaded here.
How can the case of Covid-Organics in Tanzania help us to understand South-South humanitarian assistance in times of crisis?
In their article in World Development, EveryHumanTZ researchers - Lisa Ann Richey, Line Engbo Gissel, Opportuna L.Kweka, Pernille Bærendtsen, Peter Kragelund, Herbert Qambalo Hambati and Asubisye Mwamfupe - examine how Tanzania navigated the first COVID-19 wave from March to May 2020. In the initial phase of the pandemic Tanzania’s government issued a call for strict hygiene measures but it did not impose strict lockdowns as its neighbours, and citizens were encouraged to worship, take steam baths and use locally available herbs. Tanzania’s ‘herbal strategy’ was complemented with Covid-Organics, a herbal tonic produced in Madagascar and provided as a gift from the government of Madagascar to Tanzania. Drawing on preliminary data in English and Kiswahili through a variety of methods, the article examines Covid-Organics as an exemplary case of South-South humanitarian assistance (SSHA) in crisis, suggesting that it enabled the Tanzanian government to connect to latent debates about Pan-Africanism and Julius Nyerere’s legacy, while it at the same time provided an opportunity for a public reflection on Africa’s place in the world and like other forms of humanitarianism, reflects elite politics and priorities rather than prioritizing the distribution of humanitarian goods and decreasing inequality.