Participatory wildlife management in Serengeti, Tanzania: Lessons and challenges from community based conservation outreach project

Participation in natural resources management is a recent development in the modern biodiversity conservation. However it is challenged by the designing of community conservation outreach projects, socio-economic factors, and the cultural contexts of the communities. This paper addresses the participation of local people in wildlife management in the west of Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. It is based on the questionnaire survey to 310 household heads to the six villages of Bunda and Serengeti districts. Our results indicate that local people were eager to participate in wildlife management. They were also familiar with how decisions were made and the institutions that made decisions. It was further learnt that people were not adequately involved in decision-making processes and merely informed about the decisions that had been taken. A multiple regression analysis showed that areas (Bunda and Serengeti), age of respondents, gender, household size, education level, conservation benefits, and crop loss were important variables in explaining variation in different levels of participation in natural resources management. The study suggests improved coordination to ensure effective institutional links and interactions, investments in education to local people and capacity building on participatory management in order to make participation concept and philosophy in practice, easy and appreciable.   Key words: Community based conservation, local people, participatory management, wildlife, Western Serengeti, Tanzania.