Dorobo Fund for Tanzania

Home Planet Exploration is proudly associated with the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania and all of our Safaris in East Africa are in coordination with the Dorobo Fund and its projects.  Proceeds from every client go into the Dorobo Fund, because all wilderness excursions are at some time within Dorobo project areas.    The Dorobo project started out small, as any vision does.  Dorobo is now significantly larger but goals are still the same: Helping indigenous peoples confront the modern age while preserving their land resource as wilderness.  Home Planet Exploration is actively involved with the Dorobo Fund projects through its operations, proceeds, and staff participation.  The Dorobo Fund and its vital cause are the driving force behind our partnership and contributions.

Maasai bride and groom. ©Derek Akin

All Dorobo, regardless of ethnic background , have been culturally influenced in varying degrees by the stronger and more dominant Maasai culture. For example, most Dorobo have lost their language, now speaking only Maa. They live as Maasai live, within the Maasai Kraal. In many ways the Dorobo have become culturally part of the Maasai people, providing honey for their beer, and performing the circumcision rituals on males. The future of these Dorobo is quite clear; they are becoming Maasai.   Further south however, where Maasai expansion occurred later, there are groups of Akie Dorobo who still speak their own language, but only in private and among themselves.  These clans of indigenous peoples are truly living beyond the realms of time and inherently bring value to all humanity. 

The very nature of the Dorobo is quite obviously symbolic of the present state of Earth and man, and the name fits the ideas behind the Dorobo Fund and the implication of its projects.   The lifestyle of the Dorobo is the driving ideological force underlying the Dorobo Fund, as well as, Home Planet Exploration in their involvement with the indigenous peoples of Tanzania.  Dorobo is not one ethnic group but rather many unified by a common lifestyle, a lifestyle characterized by fitting in with and working as part of a natural system, one which replenishes itself and has an understood value in this state to those living on and using this land. 

The Dorobo Fund, since its inception in the early 1980’s, has been involved in people and conservation issues beyond the scope of business interest. There are many reasons, but ultimately it comes down to the simple realization that wilderness, wildlife and the health of natural environments in general are intimately and irrevocably linked to people-both locally and globally.

With this understanding and with seeing firsthand the changes, often negative, being placed on natural resources due to the pressures of a growing and changing human population, Dorobo began to focus energy and resources into establishing partnerships and linkages with local communities whereby wildlife/wilderness for the first time became an economic option for them. The goal had been, and still is, to enter into what are mutually beneficial agreements in which access to incredible wilderness is obtained from the indigenous people. The communities benefit directly through tourist revenues, dorobo projects, boosted communal village infrastructures, and the conservation of their most precious resource: The environment they live in. 

The development of these village projects has resulted in Dorobo being on the leading edge of pushing community based conservation in Tanzania. The effort has been a cooperative one involving many people in Tanzania and throughout the globe.   Experiences in the  early years of running the Dorobo projects through a family owned safari company,  and the lessons learned from them, pushed Dorobo one step further to establish the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania. Specifically two issues stand out as the driving factors behind the reevaluation and implementing of Dorobo work into the Dorobo Fund for community based conservation partnerships.

All of these projects deal with a communally owned resource base-land, therefore the long term viability of these projects depends on widespread awareness and support from the participating communities. This implies that local people in general not only understand the project and are  involved, but that they perceive the programs as providing real benefits to them directly and or indirectly.   The experience of Dorobo leading up to the creation of the Dorobo Fund was one of realizing that widespread awareness, involvement, and capacity building in a community required time and effort that was difficult to provide through a straight tourist based partnership.

While these projects may be beneficial and positive at the moment, they are still only one small piece of the puzzle and don’t go far enough in helping to address the whole village land resource base issues.  Nor do they go far enough in empowering communities to not only determine what options they have, but also do so within the framework that asks those bigger questions related to limits, quality of life, and their children’s future.  Somehow we can not get away from being confronted with the fact that people and nature are on a collision course in which ultimately both sides suffer. At what point does human population make willful decisions about where we are going?

Dorobo, as well as, Home Planet Exploration realize that in their areas of operation they are the ones who are on the front line of these untouched wilderness areas and mankind.  If anyone can foster a mutually beneficial plan for both the environment and the indigenous people then surely it must be us. This is the intention of the alliance between Dorobo Fund and Home Planet Exploration.  The level of urgency has never been higher to push through a number of proposed plans in some truly threatened areas.  The Mzombe River Basin is one example in which professional hunting interest threaten a proposed wildlife refuge along one of the most wild rivers left on Earth.  We feel positive about the work being accomplished, and we feel a sense of urgency because the more of us there are, the fewer options we will have in relation to the type of environment we can live in and experience.   While these issues will need to be addressed at all levels, it is at the grassroots level with communities who are directly tied to the land resource base that effective change can continue to happen.

Goals of the Dorobo Fund

-To promote sustainable resource management by communities directly dependent on land resources.

-To support indigenous cultures as they interface with the modern world.

-To promote wilderness, primarily as a resource option in the context of 1 & 2, but also for its inherent worth to all who live on this Earth.

-Support of capacity building at village levels leading to local empowerment and active management of the total resource base. Inherent in this process is the need to balance potential with limits. The active participation of women within the local cultural constraints imposed is critical for the success of this process.

-Direct educational support of children and adults from disadvantaged cultures through scholarships. This is an important strategy, with longer term payoffs, but essential in confronting the future these people face.

-Short term targeted stop gap measures with immediate tangible results. At present urgent examples of this could be as follows: fuel and per diem for an anti-poaching team to follow a specific lead of recurring giraffe poaching near the urban meat markets of Arusha and Moshi: payment of hunting block fees as an interim measure to safeguard the Mzombe wilderness area until the Rungwa management plan is approved; support for local leaders to travel to Dar es Salaam to meet with ministers to plead for resource rights.

The Dorobo Fund for Tanzania is a Minnesota non-profit organization. All gifts to the fund are tax deductible.