Pastoralists face a number of challenges that hinder their way of life and stifle their ability to adapt to changes in their external environment. The challenges like climate change, political and economic marginalization, inappropriate development policies, and increasing resource competition account for the poverty and lack of essential services like water and Quality education.

Dependency on one economic activity of livestock keeping in the communities has resulted in environmental deterioration and increased vulnerability and poverty to pastoralist livelihood and to ecological stress to the area. The common activity around these areas was agriculture in both crop cultivation and animal rearing, while animal rearing (pastoralism) took control in large part due to the presence of large number of indigenous Maasai tribes that are pastoralists in nature.

The native of these areas (Maasai) their lives rely on animal keeping as a source of income for sustaining families and for other cultural purposes like marriage dowry, gift, Animals possessed show status and identity in that particular tribe (indigenous Maasai community). The land grows with grass and shrubs that provide communal grazing land for cattle and also for wildlife which are abundantly found around the area. Rainfall patterns determine when and where to graze because rainfall dictates when and where pasture can be found.

In recent decades these pastoralists facing severe ecological stress. The stress originates from the prolonged recurrence of droughts and some anthropogenic activities such as an expansion of smallholder crop cultivation, the creation of protected areas such as game reserves and the opening up of large-scale farms. These processes have tendencies to deny pastoralists of access to land, previously perceived by local pastoralists as traditional grazing lands.

During our recent campaign for community economic diversification, we conducted around pastoralist areas, as an effort to reduce environmental degradation and generate other sources of income that are environmentally friendly. The diversification will improve the community’s livelihood. The process will also improve the quality of the products so that they meet international quality standards and compete in the global market and business sustainability.

The organization introduced a project that targets to empower this community to diversify their income by establishing other environmentally friendly income generating activity the established income-generating activities will be owned by women and Youth. The project provided beehives for beekeeping to groups of small entrepreneurs in the area to raise their income while taking care of the environment and its sustainability for a better tomorrow. A hundred (100) hives were provided to ten (10) groups at Loiborsoit A village in Simanjiro District Manyara Region Northern Tanzania. The hives are hanged at the trees and the groups are responsible for protection from damages like tree cutting, charcoal burning, and other anthropogenic activities like those. The groups are responsible to protect their areas in cooperation with the village authority and other responsible agencies for forest resources protection.

Also empowering small entrepreneurs fill the gap of unemployment problem for many youths as one of the major problems in many developing countries like Tanzania, as the involvement of youth specifically women taken into consideration.