Tanzania

Through its groundbreaking Inform Women, Transform Lives campaign, The Carter Center partners with city leaders worldwide to raise awareness about women’s right to access information and to help cities reach women with valuable information and essential municipal services.  

Access to this information empowers women with a stronger voice, enabling them to participate in public life, utilize public services, and make more informed decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities. In Tanzania, the project has partnered with the city of Dar es Salaam. 

Following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the presidents of Uganda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) asked President Carter to facilitate a meeting between themselves and the presidents of Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania — countries collectively known as the Great Lakes area of Africa — to negotiate a regional initiative to repatriate 1.7 million Rwandan refugees and curb the climate of genocide. 

Our Work and Methods

The Carter Center — along with former Tanzania President Julius Nyerere, former Mali President Amadou Toumani Touré, and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu — helped facilitate summits in Egypt and Tunisia in March 1996. 

Impacts

After the summits, the presidents agreed to: 

• Prevent cross-border raids into any country 
• Stop the flow of arms to rebel groups 
• Turn over individuals indicted for genocide crimes to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 
• Allow 300 human rights observers in Rwanda to work with returning refugees 

Despite strenuous efforts to implement these commitments, there was little support from the international community, and most refugees did not return to Rwanda until 2006.

In 1988, the Center joined forces with the Tanzanian Ministry of Agriculture to increase food security. Part of a joint venture between The Carter Center and the Sasakawa-Africa Association, and led by the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, the effort helped more than 8 million sub-Saharan African small-scale farmers improve agricultural production. 

In addition, the Center collaborated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security to train small-scale farmers on rainwater harvesting and construction of underground water storage tanks as a means of increasing water availability at household level. 

Our Work and Methods

• Worked with communities to demonstrate soil restoration technologies, and experiment with cultivation methods and drought-resistant produce 
• Taught farmers to harvest and store rainwater, and use new animal-rearing techniques 
• Provided small loans for fertilizers and seeds for farmers to grow test plots 
• Helped farmers identify local markets for their surplus crops 

Impacts

• Successful participating farmers shared lessons with their neighbors, creating a ripple effect to stimulate food self-sufficiency. 
• A program focused on post-harvest technologies, including methods for processing and storing grains, became a regional showpiece, drawing interest from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zambia. 
• The first village-based savings and loan organization was established in Tanzania, as part of a new movement in Africa to provide farmers in remote areas with the credit they need to purchase new seeds, tools, and fertilizers. 

This project ended in 2004.