Ms Lilian Looloitai:

I thank the Chairman very much. I appreciate very much the invitation and the opportunity to meet the joint committee. We appreciate as NGOs in Tanzania the contribution Ireland makes through Irish Aid because we always receive support through it for our programmes. I thank the committee on behalf of my other colleagues from Tanzania.

I refer to the organisation I work with and gender issues. CORDS is a local organisation which was formed in 1998. It started to have a gender and women development programme in 2000. It has not been easy to undertake this programme. The Masai communities do not give opportunities to Masai women to access their rights. We have three objectives. One is reducing poverty through income activities. We have been doing work on income generating activities. This has to do with businesses and microfinance, from which we have seen many results. We also have a non-income poverty objective. This deals with education and the issue of capacity building for women and men because we find Masai women do not have access to education and that this has an effect from the family level to the community level. We have many challenges, but we believe we have done a lot to promote gender rights.

Property rights have also been a problem within Masai communities, especially with the link to gender issues. Women are not allowed to own livestock, land and other productive resources and this has limited their access to human rights. Education is not available because women are in the minority. The number of Masai women in the country with a degree is very low. We do not number more than 50. We feel like we are a minority among men and can also see how many of them go to university to masters level. Women are not moving that far. If one has a degree, one probably received a scholarship and there is no family support. The government is still not providing support. This has also dragged down the opportunities for women.

Decision making has been a big challenge for women in Tanzania and for us as Masai women because we are not allowed to attend meetings and talk and also to try to influence, even at the family level. This is also a factor I need to highlight. We do not have health facilities and services on Masai lands, but we believe as women we are the vulnerable among this vulnerable group. Men own properties and can sell livestock and land to go to hospital. Only men can sell livestock to take a woman or a child to hospital when they are almost dead and they probably will die on the way. We also do not have access to mobile clinics and vaccinations. I am not here to complain about my government, but we have hospitals only in the headquarters of the districts which are 80 km away from the people in rural communities. Therefore, it is difficult for the majority to access them. However, we can see how men have exposure. They are free to move or go to towns and have a higher possibility of accessing the available hospitals compared to women.

The only request I have for the Irish Government and the European people is to try to promote the issue of security of land within the pastoralist areas because we believe we are not secure as pastoralists. Members will be aware of Ngorongoro National Park and Conservation Area, the Serengeti, Tarangire, Manyara and Mkomazi. They were used to build pastoralist lands. Therefore, we believe the government and investors are torturing the pastoralists which, at the end of the day, affects pastoralist women. We need to have security over our own land in order that we can at least see something is being developed on our own land. The tendency is that the government considers the Masai are not settling, but this is not true and we do not receive social services or have access to resources surrounding our own area. I request the committee to lobby for resources and to tell our government to do something for its own people, including the people within pastoralist communities. We also need to look at changing the role of women. This has to be part of the international effort in our country because we can see how the government receives a number of policies and laws from outside, but they do not want to receive comments or an input from their own people. I request the committee to continue to support partners such as Oxfam in promoting our programmes for pastoralists and the entire developing world.