ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS PROJECT
Part of the difficulty is that ordinary people can rarely take part in government decision-making processes for siting industrial projects. Neither can they negotiate on equal terms with firms proposing such plans. The problem is compounded by poor enforcement of environmental law. Tanzania has a very poor record of compliance to environmental regulations and violations have real and profound effects on the lives of people. Invariably, local communities are absent from the processes that oversee environmental assessments and the management of ecological impacts.
Helping Hand, in partnership with the stakeholders, seeks innovative ways to develop and manage environmental regulation so that they achieve better environmental compliance. We experiment with interventions at the policy level and with institutions and communities. Helping Hand seeks to help rural communities, who are often locked out of the processes of environmental regulation, have a greater say in influencing the conditions that affect their lives.
Environment impact has affected women and girls equally. They walk for hours, often getting up in the middle of the night to begin their arduous journey and returning home carrying water containers weighing as much as 20kg No-one is exempt from the back-breaking work of walking for water — girls as young as 10 years old can be responsible for fetching water for their family, and pregnant women sometimes keep on carrying water until the day they give birth.
Recently high profile cases of women and girls being violently raped and killed in Tanzania have been reported. Despite all this effort and risks, the water they find at the end of their journey is often filthy and disease-ridden. Along with poor sanitation, dirty water causes diseases that kill 4,000 children every single day — more than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. When time spent collecting water is added to the other daily tasks that fall to women and girls, there is little time for anything else. No time to earn a living. No time for girls to go to school. In fact, 443 million school days are lost in the developing world every single year due to poor water and sanitation.
We are pursuing several approaches that have potential for large-scale application. We develop and disseminate materials that clarify regulatory procedures and laws governing environmental protection. Knowledge of these complex legal steps is essential if communities are to take full advantage of their environmental rights. We are working with communities to develop materials in multiple media—print, radio, film, mobile phone—that render laws and procedures easier to understand and use.
