World Bank-funded tourism project will continue, says Tanzania

Dar es Salaam. Implementation of the $150 million World Bank-funded tourism development project will continue, the government said on Tuesday, trashing allegations of human rights violations as advanced by a foreign-based organisation.

Reacting to reports that the World Bank was suspending funding for the project, chief government spokesperson Mobhare Matinyi said the project would continue.

“The important thing is that implementation of the project will not stop but it will continue,” Mr Matinyi told The Citizen on Tuesday.

Known as Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (Regrow), the project seeks to improve the management of natural resources and tourism assets in priority areas of southern Tanzania and to increase access to alternative livelihood activities for targeted communities.

The project started in 2017 and according to Mr Matinyi, the World Bank has so far disbursed $125 million, representing 87.4 percent of the $150 million for the project implementation.

He was however aware of the fact that financing was suspended due to allegations of human rights abuses. “The World Bank has suspended its financing due to concerns of relocations of people from the Ruaha National Park and if need be, they will wait for an explanation from the government,” Mr Matinyi said.

Reports in several foreign media outlets showed on Tuesday that the World Bank’s decision to suspend the $150 million project due to what a foreign-based organisation termed as “serious rights abuses suffered by indigenous communities in the area”.

A California-based organisation known as Oakland Institute, which led calls for the World Bank to stop funding the project, said in statement that was widely quoted by foreign media outlets On Tuesday that the World Bank’s “failure to take immediate action resulted in serious harms for the local communities”.

In its report released in November, 2023, Oakland Institute accused the World Bank of failing to hold Tanzanian authorities accountable for extrajudicial killings and sexual assaults relating to the expansion of Ruaha National Park.

The report said the Tanzanian government’s tactics to force communities away and increase tourism in Ruaha National Park, a goal of the REGROW project, were “inextricably tied to its financing by the World Bank.”

The World Bank said at the time that it “has zero tolerance for violence in the projects it finances,” adding that a panel of inspectors was reviewing a complaint related to REGROW “to determine whether a compliance audit into the concerns raised is warranted.”

But Mr Matinyi trashed accusations of human rights violations yesterday.

“No human rights violation has occurred there,” he said, adding that the government was making its own investigations with a view to understanding if there was any flaw in the project implementation.

He said should the government find out any flaw in the project implementation, it will not hesitate to rectify them accordingly.

In building its case, the Oakland Institute documented at least 12 disappearances or extrajudicial killings allegedly carried out by rangers, in addition to multiple sexual assaults of women.