Rural Revitalization Projects

Charter: Anglican Social Economic Initiatives in Tanzania (ASEI)

OFFICE

ASEI-TANZANIA is a Special Agency in the Bishop’s Office in Actions to foster social-economic activism for a just society in economic freedom, climate resilience, legal reforms, and access to land ownership in real estates, safe, clean, and running drinking water, better education, and health care for all rural citizens of Tanzania.

Through our worship of God in Christ Jesus, we are mandated to establish ourselves as a social institution for works of common good for all peoples, to reject the status quo of policies and laws which marginalize the common citizens, especially those in rural communities, as not priority for national developments, and to reject the established notion that a Church exists just for spiritual matters of Sunday Worship which have led a presence of a church in Tanzania which is sadly disconnected from affairs and concerns of their given communities. Therefore, ASEI-TANZANIA works with and within a given community with a mission for social-economic structural reform, investments, and equity in capital which break the persistent cycle of poverty.

ASEI-TANZANIA is the commitment of Bishop Kutta in presenting the Anglican Catholic Church in Tanzania as trusted partner to break off that negative understanding of the Church by making sure our Church becomes one with a society in rejecting poverty and all forms of social injustices of unjust society in Tanzania. Therefore,ASEI-TANZANIA's role; alongside other public and private sectors, international investors, multilateral stakeholders, and heads of state, is to better laws and policies, trade relations, women’s economic empowerment, health and education system, and strengthening economic opportunities to all. With this in mind, ASEI-TANZANIA is established as a Church’s Theological Practitioner for sustainable lifesaving programs in the continuing strategic and mutual partnerships.

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MISSION STATEMENT

ASEI-TANZANIA is leveraging land ownership and property rights to rural communities in sustainable and inclusive investments programs for poverty reductions for economic growth through Rural Planning, Development, and Monitoring (RPDM), Capital Inclusion (CI), and Social Revitalization (SR).

RATIONALE

  1. Projects RPDM, CI and SR aim in leveraging social-economic investment in rural communities in Tanzania for emerging modernized rural communities, sustainable modern agricultural industrial, green and environmental upgrades, housings, clean running water and energy supply, sewage system, recreational parks, and social services such as schools, hospitals, religious houses, police, fire stations, and the alike. Hand to hand with all these, ASEI-TANZANIA will also leverage boost economic growth of communities in rural Tanzania and give those residents the leverage of legal land ownership and property rights as their social and economic capital to a modern economy.

  2. Tanzanian’s rural communities need ASEI-TANZANIA. Our projects are designed to be the most integral module for poverty reduction and economic growth directly targeting residents of rural communities in Tanzania, something which is absent in national policy and priorities in the government. Land is fundamental to investment and economic growth, yet legal land ownership and property rights are things which only the rich in towns and cities enjoy in Tanzania, leaving the rural communities systematically marginalized and put into disadvantage in equity and capitals. It is with this evidence, ASEI-TANZANIA seeks funds and partners to work with rural communities in projects RPDM, CI, and RS that help secure and protect lands and property rights for local rural residents, enable rural lands to be more productive and better managed, and make rural lands markets and other land-dependent markets function better.

  3. ASEI-TANZANIA’s projects directly empower the poor in rural communities, strengthen their investment climate, and contribute to job and wealth creation amidst. As a result, successful land projects will have deep, systemic, and long-lasting impact on economic growth and poverty reduction. Therefore, ASEI-TANZANIA is an evidence-based project because land ownerships, land developments, land managements, and land markets play a central role in every economy. In this case, land planning is key to all social infrastructure investments to unlock and secure that economy to households’ wealth and incomes; to the productivity of firms engaged in manufacturing, agriculture, or services; and they impact the availability and costs of essential human needs such as food, transportation, water, energy, and housing.

    According to MCC, “the income and productivity of individuals, households, and firms depends on how well their own and others’ land rights and access are secured and protected, how confident they are that they will reap the benefits of their land improvements and investments, how easy it is to access or transfer land through sales or rental, and how well broader land use regulations promote efficient and compatible land uses.”

  4. The evidence so far in Tanzania show that individuals communities in rural Tanzania are left out from fair and just public land uses in the larger land markets, which made these rural communities marginalized by the government’s policies, priorities, institutions, and incentives. The lack of attention to rural communities has resulted in extra painful and lethal costs of manufacturing inefficiencies and inequities of social-economic sectors – including agriculture, transport, water, power - that have negatively impact growth, worsen poverty, undermine access to goods and services, and aggravate social exclusion. ASEI-TANZANIA seeks to reject and end this obsolete injustice to rural communities because there is no way a modern economy in a global community can afford this injustice against rural lives’ civil rights to arise from an ongoing transition from traditional to modern market economies.

  5. It is NOT impossible to rise to the challenges of modern and global economy without ASEI-TANZANIA’s implementations. Towards inevitable changes from land uses, only secured by traditional, undocumented rights, and aggravate pressures on land supply and scarcity, ASEI-TANZANIA works on evidence that formal systems don’t fully functional on traditional systems. It is this reality which aggravates our social gospel practitioners to act on RPDM module against a higher risk of conflict between modern economy and traditional systems which yields insecurity and can further dampen productivity and investment; especially so in the face of climate changes.

  6. As a means to our Social Justice Practices, RPDM is not a stand-alone land projects; meaning for land administration improvement, expansion of land access or allocation, formalization of land rights, improvement of land tenure security, or expansion of land planning and management--it is obvious the case that land is identified as a binding constraint to a rural lives’ economic growth--, but together with it is a necessary complement to CI components in another sectors’ impact and sustainability in modern farming, irrigation, and housing projects to achieve the expected economic productivities, and ultimately bring SR into play in social impact results of rural communities investments.

MECHANISM

Our mechanism is of Community Investment, Capital Inclusion, and Social Revitalization (CICISR). Through it, we are emphasizing community ownership to guarantee that communities can sustain progress beyond funding cycles.

CICISR’s NATURE IN LOCAL RURAL ECONOMIC GROWTH AND INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY

Rural Planning, Development, and Monitoring (RPDM) are our evidenced-based initiatives program for CICISR for positive and measured economic growth of rural communities of Tanzania and strengthening our international relationships.

LIAISON

The Canon of DECD (Department of Economic and Community Development) is a liaison in sponsoring, accountability, and monitoring expertise to make sure our rural given communities amidst our parishes prosper. The role of this Canon is to ensures that funds and partnerships are carried effectively by giving local communities the ability to hold these programs accountable by embedding partnerships, transparency, and monitoring and surveillance into each project.

MEASURES AGAINST UNFAIR LAND ACQUISITION

  1. RPDM’s dimension of Environmental and Social Performance Standards (ESPS) are set against unfair land acquisition which has shown evidently to be hazards for resettlement towards implementations of projects. So ASEI-TANZANIA understands that our RPDM practitioners must put practical and fair mechanism to mitigate causes of land constraint in the transition from traditional system to modern economy sectors such as transport, water, and power. One of factor on the table against unfair land acquisition is the consensus from rural communities that RPDM must ensure the rural communities that RPDM will secure those lands not to outsiders; meaning there shall be established Memorandum of Understanding between RPDM and rural communities that land acquisition shall remain within the residents of those rural communities to better serve rural communities’ needs and to avoid the rich people from taking over the land.

  2. Likewise, RPDM and CI have taken strong legal rights to access land acquisition to women to support women’s economic empowerment against barriers that cultural norms pose for women’s equal access to land, land rights and land governance participation. EAMCI pay specific attention to ways women obtain rights to land, independently as well as through inheritance and formal and informal marriage.

PARTNER WITH US

ASEI-TANZANIA considers partnership as a mutual collaborative relationship in which ASEI-TANZANIA and member partner/s work together to either achieve a common purpose or undertake a specific task while mutually share risks, responsibilities, resources and competencies, and benefits through mutually determine of goals, structure, governance, roles and responsibilities of our collaboration. Practically, ASEI-TANZANIA partnerships are developed directly with the partner/s to generate public good that can be met via partnership/s towards equitably co-develop what is required, each party brings complementary resources, including intangible resources, expected outcomes are agreed at the beginning, usually with flexibility over the “how,” mutually accountable to each other for delivery of commitments, and partnership/s is/are based on trust and mutual benefit, with power balanced appropriately. Therefore:

  1. ASEI-TANZANIA’s seeking of funds and partnerships will ensure that RPDM, CI, and SR are implemented in a way which welcome innovations and explore tools that can boost project performance in results-based. These innovations include appropriate usages of technology to solve specific problems.

  2. To ensure long-term impact and sustainability, ASEI-TANZANIA ensures these investments put rural communities of Tanzania in the path to valuing new technology more broadly while building both the commitment and capacity to sustain these investments.

  3. Within this process, we pay close attention to the alignment of partner to the Tanzanian Government legal and procedural standards for technology tools and their alignment with market developments and cost-efficiency. This means we can; if appropriate and effective, work with the Tanzanian government institutions in flexible local oriented tenure options to secure commitments to flexible approaches to uncomplicated and low-cost titling instruments; using easy, low-cost mapping tools, and broadening the universe of stakeholders who can meet partner government standards for information gathering and management. Yet, we will not compromise with international quality on anything of ASEI-TANZANIA’s projects. Our goal and commitment are to the service of our existing demands of rural citizens of Tanzania.

SETING A PILOT REGION

In a whole picture, the settings of ASEI-TANZANIA’s implementations are rural communities of every presence of our parochial ministries. Each parish’s village then is a hub for ASEI-TANZANIA. However, the districts of Kongwa and Mpwapwa are together jointed as a Pilot Regional hub for ASEI-TANZANIA.

CONCLUSION

ASEI-TANZANIA works to:

  1. Ensure that rural communities are both modernized and protected from urbanization

  2. Ensure RPDM becomes an inventive mechanism for rural community investments in clean and safe running water system for domestic use, sewage systems, energy supply, all season roads, and rain water harvest dams for irrigations.

  3. Ensure understanding of the role of land markets in both enabling opportunity and underpinning exclusion.

  4. Improve access to land for investors and private individuals;

  5. Decentralize land tenure services to rural local levels;

  6. Launch new instruments for recording land rights;

  7. Identify and map boundaries of communities and other jurisdictions;

  8. Land use planning to optimize uses of land and access to land resources;

  9. Develop rural-based industrial land that better meets the needs of manufacturing firms;

  10. Create or upgrade land information systems;

  11. Improve access to land for children, the aged, and people with disabilities

Written by Rt. Rev. Phillip E. Kutta; Bishop of Tanzania on June 29th, 2024 and updated on February 17th, 2025